Originally Posted by
sherpster
From my outside the company perspective it seems like all the UAL talk of adding capacity hasnt resulted in more pilots being hired. There aren't any classes posted for Jan yet. Meanwhile AA has announced officially 925 new hires and has scheduled pilots for Jan class dates and has Feb class dates on the books.
I do keep reading about new RJ's at UAL though.
The plan to grow starts with adding RJ feed to hubs, trying to capture those markets where it makes sense to fly to a UA hub. Some established markets have upgauged to mainline already, and some hub to hub and hub to major markets(mco, sea, bos, tpa) have upgauged as well. None of that has really driven a need to expand the seniority list by much. The added mainline flying which has, has mostly been offset by increased scheduling efficiency with pbs and increased reserve utilization.
Having said all that, the mgmt plan is either going to take off soon (pun intended), or capacity growth will stall and wall street will be the first to get notified. New mgmt has not been ambiguous about saying UAL's previous shrinkage was a bad idea, so if you had to pick a legacy that will offer the most relative seniority progression over the next few years due to SL expansion, UAL is what I'd bet on.