We don’t have a “seat lock”. What we have at Delta is a “bid lock”.

Once eligible to bid after 1 or 2 years as a NH, you may still end up in your seat for up to a year depending on how long the conversions take. Some are 180 days, once a year they do 365 days.

Worst case if you are on the wrong plane and can’t get to your home base that you’d like(say you are ATL 717, but want LAX 737) could be up to two + years. If a bid closes right before your one year is up, you could theoretically have to wait 3-5 months for another bid and if it’s a 365 day conversion you technically may have to wait another year bringing your “one year” seat lock out to 2-2.5 years.

This happened to some guys I know that were awarded ATL MD-88 that lived in the NYC area right after we closed NYC88. They had to do ATL for a year, then there were no bids for a while, then it was a long conversion.