It’s not always a valid assumption that new hires on the 777 are going to be on reserve the longest. There are a number of dynamics in play, such as the much larger number of retirements occurring regularly, the continued expansion of the 777 and 767 fleets and of course the excessive periods of dead time between equipment bids at Fedex. We are the only airline I know of that goes years without offering the most senior seats to current pilots and puts new hires into those seats instead.
The bottom 25% of FOs on the 777 were hired in the last two years. So, just assuming that a new guy is going to have the same experience on the senior international a/c as we might have had 10 years ago isn’t always the case. The company has been pumping new hires into that seat non-stop. There are FOs on the 777 getting lines who have been on the property less than a year. If we had monthly equipment bids, that would be a different story. But, since the company has gone more than two years without offering those seats to pilots already on the property, we end up with some serious seniority abrogation.
That ship has sailed for a while since the 777 pipeline is full until 2018 and manning appears to be stabilizing. So those on the bottom now probably will be spending some quality time on reserve. With the accelerated acquisition of more aircraft, maybe we’ll see another bid and further expansion.
For now, the ones hired 2 years ago are far from the assumed juniority many would expect. Absent a bump and flush excess bid, they’re going to be just fine. I just flew with an FO hired 18 months ago who is at about 77%. It took me 10 years to get to that point.
Now that they’ve started to fix the 757/767 training back log and the 777 pipeline is full, it’s probably safe to say that 767 and 757 are probably a better bet for quicker seniority improvement than the 777. I just jumpseated with a MEM 767 FO hired in Jan. Just finishing up IOE and differences this month. He expects to be on reserve a few months. Meanwhile, there are 757 new hires who have been stagnated on reserve for a long time while the company tried to un-fook the issues with training.