Upgrade time right now is about 26 months. It will start dropping quickly in the next few months. I think that if upgrade times reach 3 years, there will be much bigger things to worry about.

The only thing that could cause that to happen would be something incredibly damaging to the whole airline system (9/11 and the age 65 rule). At that point, all bets are off for everything.

We are just about finished with the 2014 hires upgrading.

Expect upgrade times to drop to 18 months once we get past July 2015 hires.

Here are some interesting numbers. Lets look at June 2015 through September 2015, there are only 53 pilots still on property that were hired during those 4 months. Only 19 of those are FOs. The rest are Captains. So, we will upgrade more than 4 months worth of new hires in 1 month.

Expanding it to look at a 1 year interval. July 2015 through July 16.

There are 151 pilots on property that were hired in that 1 year. Of those, 116 are active FO's. The rest are already captains or sim/ground instructors. If we are upgrading 25 a month, we will upgrade a full year worth of new hires in about 4 months.

These numbers also aren't taking attrition into account. We are losing FO's to major and LCC's at an increasing rate. Expect those times to drop even more with attrition.