Originally Posted by
davidm21
I agree that the company is a little heavy on FO manning. I also heard that ground school dates have been postponed until after the holidays. I'm not however sure how much attrition will actually occur within the FO ranks. Unfortunately FO to Captain upgrade rates occur less often than SA hiring street captains to fill requirements (observation). I see this as a long term problem for the company in terms of retention (FOs reaching 1500-2000 hours will likely jump ship if there's no movement in sight). Just my $.02
True true, there have been a couple of upgrades happening lately though, one very recently in NorCal. I keep hearing that they want to stop hiring street captains and start treating it like a normal airline and upgrading the FO's and not hiring street captains. That being said, the rate of growth, with 10 planes arriving in 2016, might make it a tad bit hard to do that. But with 50 planes over 5 years starting in 2016, it'd be hard to jump ship, because with that much growth, its bound to happen sooner rather than later.
Hopefully the lack of new airplanes until the new year, will allow the company to stabilize a bit with staffing, and upgrade a few FO's. We are a bit heavy on FO's but we could definitely use more Captains. The other thing to consider, is that upgrades are not just based on hours or time with the company, but also on merit.