I believe as long as Premium time remains relatively accessible, the upgrade time will drop. We have A LOT of FO’s here that will not commute to the west coast and a large subset of those that will not upgrade until they can upgrade in base or upgrade in a VERY easy commute. Count me in the later. As long as we have the ability to make $250k+ by working hard and driving to work, we won’t put our bodies and personal lives through a commute lifestyle.

The big unknown for SW is how quickly we can wrap up training, resulting in expanded operations and additional upgrades. An extra 200-300 upgrades held back because of training limitations will have a huge impact on the expansion and upgrade time over time.

My bet is we see the upgrade fall to probably 8 years (for west coast bases only) with larger numbers than ever bypassing.