Originally Posted by
conquestdz
The real unknown variable is how many senior FO's decide to upgrade. There are a ton of them and if they see an opportunity here with the base opening, then the handful of net upgrades will do little to stem the carnage. Remember they do the vacancy first and then the displacements. You can assume all of the SEA Capt vacancies will go to senior FO's. Some SEA CA might go south, but probably not many. What are the senior LAX FO's going to do? If they take a bunch of the proffered captain slots as current LAX captains move to SAN, then the displacement portion of the bid will be a bloodbath. Same question with SFO. If the senior FO's in California like being senior FO's and don't upgrade, then everything will be not so bad. But if they are ready for a change, then things will get ugly quick. I really don't have a barometer on how this will go down, but it would be foolish to discount the threat of significant downgrades.
There are 167 FOs senior to our most junior captain who bid for captain on the last bid who were denied a position due to lack of vacancies. It’s all available on the last bid transaction log.
Im assuming the amount of downgrades has been modeled and deemed acceptable by management. They came into my CQ ground school and mentioned that downgrades were a concern when they were considering a reduction to open SAN. So they were aware of the potentials.