Originally Posted by Da40Pilot

I am not sure what the fuzz is all about. Current contract allows upgrade at 500 hours on United metal and people are upgrading. This means that a new hire 777 FO can upgrade to 737 CA as long as he has 500 hours on United metal. The new contract says they have to have at a minimum 350 hours time on type before they can upgrade and once they do, a minimum of 100 hours of OE. That's only 50 hours less than previous contract and with 100 hours of managed OE included and addtl. ground school on top of that.

Old contract: 500 hours on United metal.
New contract: 450 hours on United metal and type and they still have to pass through the school house twice and through OE twice and get FAA sign offs etc - meaning, It's not an "automatic Captain" just being thrown into the wild.

Furthermore, while that junior person has been assigned the CA upgrade, if any other senior pilot upgrades between the new hire's indoc and the 350 hours, they can get bumped off their upgrade.

Most people that come here have already been Captains before, a lot at regionals with way worse conditions and to way more "manual" airports. I am not worried about this one bit. There is no data that supports that a new hire (which does not equate to lack of experience) is more prone to having an incident than a highly experienced/more senior crew, just to give an example. I think this has been proven already by taking a look at the latest slew of incidents in our industry.