Many of those retirements were covered on earlier vacancy bids. No one bidding today will be done training to cover guys retiring next month, or even the month after, let alone September. Training won't even start until August most likely, and they won't start hitting the line until October.

So those 777 Captain bids back in Jan, Feb, Mar were to cover those guys retiring. The SFO 10 and EWR 10 are to start training guys for the growth. You can't just look at those numbers and say those are to replace those exact pilots. Lots of other BES have retirements that don't match exactly with the bid. The fleet may already be under/over staffed in that BES so you don't know. MIN/MAX are only for bidding purposes. They change monthly.

All I'm saying is that the same people who put out the bid stated that there were 60 positions to start staffing for the new deliveries and each base got 10 Captain slots.

So I'm betting that this does start to staff the new 777s, but that's mostly because I believe what Crew Planning said today in their newsletter rather than my own airchair analysis.