As a previous poster said, equipment bids around here are far less frequent than at other places, but that's not the whole story. On a relative size basis, we bid the same amount of seats as any other airline in a given year, but we just typically do it in about 1.5 bids a year vs the multiple bids you might see at a Delta or United. To date the big loss for us with this system is that it makes it harder to time your training in a way that's most advantageous for your life schedule and/or seniority. We have a new system coming at some point that will have some affect on that depending on how the crew force uses it on a practical basis-a big unknown at this time. The biggest unknown however is our 757 & 767 training program. That is the real reason that the training times are so long from award on that fleet and it also affects training for other fleets as well. Typically we hold one big bid a year and the most junior people train within 10-12 mos from the close of that award at most. Because of issues with the 756 though, that's been pushed out somewhat. In various stages over the next year or so, I expect that the gap will narrow as more simulators come online. Then the next wild card will probably be how excited the company gets about being able to up the utilization on the 767 and how ambitious they decide to get with MD10 retirements because of it.
In the end the guy who said 5-7 is probably right, but I wouldn't be floored if a combo of events between more sims and bidding for training allowed some lucky folk to slide into the 2-3 year range. Stuff like this happens at all airlines over time and rarely do we see it coming beforehand.