Originally Posted by
Mitchell Gant
I don’t think this will last long. For those that don’t remember, United was forcing pilots into captain slots, that was happening Dec ‘23 to Mar’24. Those 300+ pilots are now past the one year mark and 500 hours at United and now eligible for upgrade. Once all go through training and more WB captains retire and senior NB captains fill those slots, the need for NB captains will be in high demand once again. I believe by early ‘26 captains upgrades will be back down to 3-4 year seniority for summer flying ‘26.
To be clear: not a single new hire was ever forced into upgrading. They were all given the option to give up their upgrade slot if a pilot already on property wanted the slot. Prior to fall 2024, plenty of new hires did give up their slots. However, none of them have given up their slots during the past few vacancy bids, because I think they realized that if they did, it would be years before they could upgrade.
I missed the new hire CA thing by one week 😬