At Horizon you are seatlocked for 4 years on the Q400, you cannot switch over to the jet as an FO. Nothing will prevent you from upgrading on either the Q400 or E175, however you will need about 15 years of seniority before you could hold E175 captain. So that pretty much leaves just the Q400 for you to upgrade on. The E175 will be strictly reserved for super senior captains and new hires after March 2017.

The APC profile says upgrade in 2.5-3 years and that is correct...if you were hired 2.5-3 years ago. We had a massive wave of new hires in 2014-2015 and 8 months of seniority stagnation when Alaska halted all of their classes. So the 2.5 year upgrade is not possible if you were hired today and nothing changed. Looking at the seniority list theres 2 year FOs that still have 150+ FO's infront of them, and we only upgrade 4-8 every other month and none during summer. 90% of our captains are lifers and not going anywhere so movement is pretty much centered on FOs bailing or aircraft growth. We still don't know if the company will park Q's or not. I don't think they want to, but as of right now we cant get any new hires into the Q for the reasons above and our lack of incentives (namely none) that we offer new hires.

Tomorrow will be interesting because our LOA that would increase new hire pay to $41 (and give the company freedom to change it whenever they want) and reduce the seat lock to 2 years (still worthless if you're hired before the jets arrive) will be voted down. We predict the company will violate our contract and offer new hire bonuses anyway which will start a long drawn out court battle grievance process.

It's going to get ugly, I would recommend Compass or Skywest to anyone who *has* to live in a PNW base.