How many retirements? How many 757s coming? Will freight fall off after peak or stay up?
The real question here is what are the company's planned block hours for the next year? That's the heart of manning requirements. They keep those numbers close to the vest. I suspect that sometime in Jan-Feb, they will review this year's peak and other numbers, come up with a working 2010 plan, and go from there on bids. 777 and 757 bids with no secondaries don't hurt their 4.a.2.b case in their opinion so those should be no brainers-they basically said so in the last bid.
I see a vacancy for ANC. They draft too much and the MEM bidpack is nearing normal line averages.
Looking at their press releases and other talk, they seem pretty convinced that the 777 will allow them to overfly ANC quite a bit. We'll see if that's true or not, but I don't see them adding to ANC until they've had a chance to test their theory.
More than a few 727 CAs and widebody FOs have to upgrade to create secondaries for 727 FOs and SOs to fill.
That's going to be interesting. The 727 is in a state of excess and will be until it goes away. It has been for years, it's just more noticeable now with no upward and plenty of backward movement. I think the company operating fleet thing says they're only using about 45-50 of them right now. Will the company fill secondaries in the front seats when those people move out, or will they just let the line averages in the front seats increase in an attempt to minimize 727 training costs by making S/O's wait until they can hold something else? While nothing is perfect and I'm sure they will have to fill some secondaries over time, without a big uptick in the economy it seems likely forcing their hand, why wouldn't they do this?
In fact if things don't get better for a long time, I could see a situation where the company is actually hiring into the 757 right seat with S/O's still stuck in the back of the Deuce. Since we have no control over when they company trains an award, they could excess the whole 727 a long time before it goes away for good and then subsequently post a 757 vacancy bid. The S/O's would likely hold a 757 right seat bid with a training date beyond what a newhires would have on the plane, getting POP(yes, again!) Unless the economy forces their hand, they're going to shut that plane down as economically as possible, they've already shown that.
OR and PC have been mums the word on pretty much everything lately bc of peak. However I expect one or both of them will give us another 'loveline' after peak giving us their vision of the 'horrors' before us. It shouldn't be long before we have some new stuff to speculate on.
