Originally Posted by
MasterOfPuppets
Sure
Delta, according to air fleets.net, has 860 jets. They are parking all of their MD-80/90 fleet by 2020 which is 166 aircraft plus an unknown amount of old 757s and A320s. They have 200 or so aircraft on order so their fleet will remain mostly flat.
United by comparison has 100 or so jets due by the end of 2020 and we are not retiring anything. after 2020 we have 100 more 737 due.
So by 2020 if we from by 6-8% every year and don't park any jets we will be roughly the same size as DL. Which means our upgrade should be pretty close to inline with theirs.
The most Junior DL CA today is on the MD-80 so unless that pilot gets someone junior to them on a bid before they start displacing off the MD-80 they will have to displace into an FO seat.
The next junior CA aircraft is the 717, a 100 seater, I do believe that UA will have a 100 seat aircraft order on the books by early next year or sooner. If that happens UAs upgrade will drop to a year just due to the pay rates.
DL has 2014 hires as CAs on the airbus and 737 as I said above we are only 1000 numbers away from this here at United. My guess is by spring of next year there will be a 2013-2014 CA on the 737/320 at United.
DL has hired over 1000 a year for the last 4 years while United has hired 600 on average. That means that there are 400 more pilots to get through every year at DL to make CA. So by 2020 I think United will have more junior CAs than DL.
I know there are a ton of assumptions in there but going off of todays info and a successful growth plan United will be on the same playing field as DL by 2020. Thats my math.
So someone else did the math for us. The seniority progression report at reunion lane predicts when you can hold a seat based on current staffing and retirements. I plugged in the employee number of the junior pilot on the seniority list in July 2014. He will hold SFO 320CA in April 2022 or about 8 years after he was hired. Assuming the aggressive 4-6% of growth you are predicting there will be about 800 more captain seats in the next 3 years or about 2 years worth of retirements. So just by retirements it will take him 8 years to upgrade and assuming your growth model it will take him 6 years.
I agree with you that we will not be retiring any aircraft in the next 5 years. Our oldest airframes the 767-300’s are going through cabin reconfig now, and our older narrowbody a/c the A320’s have had cabin updates as well.