Originally Posted by
Bainite
Yep, I was hired in April 98, never furloughed, but got within 100 from bottom, spent 15 years in the bottom 25% of seniority list, unable to upgrade until 16 years after hire (if I had wanted to be very junior MD88A in NYC).
I'm doing OK now as A350 FO with a little over 5 years left and 1.5 mil in my 401k. I don't see any special carve out for me or anybody else happening. It was a crapshoot when we got hired and we just play the cards we were dealt. Plenty of folks had it worse, some had it better, thems the breaks.
Best thing we can do as a union is improve work rules and pay for everybody and stop dividing the pilot group with targeted issues.
If you were older than average (and NWA tended to an older demographic), with just a little longevity, the point cliff hit pretty hard. The opposite, with a younger guy but with more time worked out better because there was a bit more time to recapture it with a flat DC.
The peak hiring was in mid-98 in that cycle. If you managed to get in before that, you tended to do relatively better. DC-9 captains just before the age-65 thing made it into mid-98 before the big re-wind. After that, you were locked into whatever it was you were doing for a long time.