My question to the OP. Do you want to be a captain?

Do some math. At Frontier/Spirit, how many aircraft are coming and where do you fit in the grand scheme of things? You can reasonably calculate where you will fall within a few years based on aircraft retirement schedule, scheduled aircraft deliveries and mandatory retirements. Do that for both airlines.

At Southwest, in order to upgrade to captain, you will need to be at 60% on the system seniority. Given our airline "maturity", meaning we aren't growing exponentially, this will simply take an upward of a decade due to sheer numbers. As of right now, we are at 9,149 pilots on our system seniority. Currently a junior lance captain can't hold a captain bid, but has been on property just over 10 years. He is sitting right at 63% or around 5,760 . He still has over 400 FO's systemwide between him and the plug captain seat. Basically a lance captain is trained in both seats, bids as an FO, can pick up captain trips from OT or from other captains giving away their flying and get paid as a captain for those. You can stay a lance for up to a year with current hiring before you'll either fully upgrade to captain, or you will go back to full time FO.

We have just under 1,000 pilots reaching Age 65 in the next 5 years. That current lance has almost 3,500 pilots below him. With retirement numbers in mind, how many aircraft would have to be additions to our fleet vs. replacements in order for you to upgrade?

Now... it's true that we can put up some good numbers even as FO's. Pretty much since getting on the property, I've learned to play the game to maximize my income and I've been at it since literally the very first trip off of my IOE. So while you can make a killing, it does come at the expense of your quality of life because you will work for it.

Interestingly, my DOH holds captain literally everywhere else, including legacies, cargo and ULCC's. At Southwest, I won't have to worry about it for a few more years.

Bottom line, if you want to be a captain, this is not the airline for you.