flensr

Honestly you never know month to month. LAX was bookended for a long time with senior bubbas from TX who wanted to fly ETOPS instead of chasing TX thunderstorms or MDW schenanigans, new hires, and wedged in the middle are 20+ bypassing FOs and a reasonable number of new CAs, some who chose LAX and some who are here because they picked first available. Thing is... At one point even while sending LAX new folks they involuntarily displaced about a dozen LAX FOs and CAs. Considering there were only a few hundred total in base, it was a surprisingly high percentage even though the overall number wasn't terribly high. It took some of those folks months to get back.

The point is you never know how seniority is going to work out with base bids, even in places where you can make a pretty reasonable big-picture guess about how things will work out. As an example, I was surprised a few months ago to see the junior CA in system was at MDW. Didn't expect that. As others have said, once BNA opens there will be a big shuffling and I'd bet every base will have some openings for relatively junior pilots as people hop around. SWA seems to have a whole lot of pilots who play tourist with their base bid and I'm cool with that, but it means any time something new and shiny happens you get a bunch of movement which can be awesome for our junior pilots. This stuff comes and goes and you gotta ride with it.

Regarding how SWA is with basing compared to other airlines and options a new hire may have... I haven't heard one thing to inform me that we're any worse than any other airline. I have heard however that we are one of only a handful that seem to predictably run a base vacancy bid every single month even when hiring is slow, upgrades are slow, and the numbers are really small. That's totally a good thing in our favor in my opinion and not all airlines do that.

One thing I noticed also... Our seat lock rules changed just a bit in a way that could make it slightly less desirable for pilots to switch bases just to get a better vacation bid. I can't remember the exact wording but I distinctly remember thinking that it would likely kill off a good chunk of the base swapping for the sole purpose of enhancing vacation bidding. The results of that haven't been seen yet but I think we'll see some vacancy result differences this year just prior to vacation bidding.