You can’t predict the future, especially in the airline business. My newly commissioned (from cadets) grandfather was just completing training in the B-26 in Texas when the (BIG) bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Army Air Corps didn’t even wait for the formal surrender, they started processing people for discharge immediately. Gramps went into the reserves but didn’t actually consider flying for an airline until a decade later. He got hired by a legacy that’s still around today but was way down on the seniority list and spent years on reserve and was looking at a decade or two for upgrade. Then he got an offer to come work as a captain for another airline - a new startup - that also flew the aircraft he was flying as an FO. If he made the jump he was going to be in the top ten on their seniority list.

The prospect of leaving a legacy for an upstart new airline was certainly “iffy” to say the least. So he asked his stock broker about the new airline, if the management was good, if the economics made sense, etc. what he was told was something like this.

The management was probably OK but they were under capitalized. They didn’t actually own most of their aircraft, they were leased, and while they might actually make it if they survived their first three years, he thought the undercapitalization would probably kill them before three years were up.

Gramps stayed with the legacy, although he knew a couple of his fellow FOs even junior to him that made the jump. And of course the stockbroker was right, the new airline was undercapitalized and it did go under. Except this was back before deregulation and airlines were not allowed to REALLY go under. One of their competitors was “encouraged’ to buy them by the CAB. And in this case that competitor was the Legacy gramps worked for.

His company wound up repainting the planes and integrating the seniority lists. Those FOs junior to gramps who made the ‘boneheaded’ move of leaving the legacy wound up thousands of seniority numbers higher than when they’d left, and seat-locked as captains under the CAB directed merger.

And yeah, I know, the CAB went away in 1985, but it’s still the airline business and it’s still unpredictable and it may turn on you in a moment however much you try to hedge your bets. Aviation will never love you but if you treat them right your family will.

Don’t short change your family for something you have no real control over anyway.