With new hire classes of 25 and the 35 additional 700s coming, upgrade time should drop to ~18 months. If the new hire classes are larger, all the better.

Here's the math: there are currently ~550 FOs that are active (actually fly the airplane, not an instructor or management). We should be upgrading 24 a month minimum moving forward (12 every 2 weeks). Also, we lose about 12 FOs a month to other carrier but being conservative, let's just say that 6 will be above you on average. That means that you should move up 30 spots a month on the FO list. 550/30=18.3.

6 months from now, we will likely have 650 FOs on the list, so if you wait to get hired, it could be back to 2 years by that time.

We did have upgrade classes in 2015 that were much larger than 12 and on some months we upgraded 40. If captain attrition does what they expect it to, and new hire classes keep filling up, upgrade time will be less than 2 years.

Don't forget that we have several months in early 2016 where we only hired 8-10 a month, and some of them have already left. In one month, we could upgrade 6 months of new hires easily.

Expect attrition to increase from the current level of 25 a month in 2017 by at least another 10 a month on average.