Originally Posted by
Turbosina
During a very short window in time (late '23 through early April '24 hires), we had new hires get CA slots in indoc. To my knowledge, nobody actually went to upgrade class after 350 hours, but they did start receiving CA pay at 350 hours.
However -- since the new hire CA phenomenon ended in April '24 (the last class to have NHCA slots was April 2, 2024) -- CA slots have gone WAY more senior. The current vacancy bid has the most junior NBCA at 61 pct system seniority. Lots and lots of senior FOs who delayed upgrade are now bidding for NBCA.
I' would be utterly astonished if we ever see CA slots being awarded in indoc ever again. We do have a large NBCA vacancy bid supposedly happening in November, and I can see upgrade dropping to maybe 2 years at that time. Which is of course ludicrously quick by any measure...
We just had a bid in February of this year where pilots under 3 years were getting Airbus CA, and it wasn't even a very big bid. Also we haven't had a Narrowbody bid since then, only a couple backfills, so to say "its gone senior" isn't really accurate since when you only have one backfill and its someone with 7,000 seniority number that's because its only one person so it isn't a fair picture of actual seniority.