Progression at the top end is slow. All the senior CAs that don’t want to fly the 78, love their 2 day Hawaii trips. Not efficient and you’re gone the full two days, but it is an easy trip.
LA is a weird base because it’s limited. There is no room to grow literally (like DEN or IAH) and figuratively (LAWA won’t allow one airline to dominate). Yes terminal 9 will be built sometime in the next decade but there have been company emails that describe how “great terminal 9 will be for our STAR Alliance partners!”. So not sure how much dedicated gate space we will have there. There’s also no real room to shrink because it is such an important market. But between the big four airlines there everyone is around 18-22% of the market. No clear leader.
What that means for UAL is you have a medium size 737 base. A small A320 base. A small and further shrinking 756 base. And a medium 787 base. The movement has been good on the FO side for the 73. It’ll be 2-3 years before you can get to the plug on the 78. But that’s my guess I haven’t looked at the seniority numbers to see if that’s accurate. I’m interested to see where they’re going to be putting these 78s that are being delivered this year and the years to come. And whether or not it will grow the 78 base in LA. I’m hopefully pessimistic.