I'll throw in my own thoughts on this subject....


What it comes down to is there are two ways you can obtain the seniority to upgrade (usually around 50% of the way up the list)...

1) By the airline growing or..
2) Pilots above you leaving

Many pilots previously had the benefits of their airlines growing amazingly quickly. Doubling in size in 2 years allowed for, obviously, 2 year upgrades.. even if nobody left. They also had the benefits of lots of pilots leaving above them (some regionals had 1/4 of their list leaving per year)

These things aren't happening anymore. No regionals are going to be getting new 100-200 aircraft contracts. The days of those quick upgrades are over. That leaves only people leaving as a method for upgrading. Generally, people leave the worse regionals in more numbers than the better ones. But there is very little hiring going on right now. That means few are leaving, and there are few upgrades.

Whats this all mean? My guess is that upgrade times at all regionals are going to go up. The industry isn't expanding anymore. And when you hear that they have a "4 year" upgrade... thats for a pilot hired 4 years ago. It has zero bearing on a pilot hired today. Additionally, almost all of those "quick upgrades" from a few years ago... are still at their regional. They got in, upgraded quick, and got stuck. Now with 1000...2000...even 3000 hours RJ PIC time, they're still at their crappy regional suffering. Theres nowhere to go. If there isn't anywhere hiring, it doesn't matter how much jet PIC time you have. And when places really start to hire, these guys with 1000-3000 jet PIC are all going to have a lot of competition before they can get out. Think about how many RJ Captains are sitting around collecting Jet PIC time every day... we have an entire industry full of them.

Go somewhere that has a future and you can deal with the day to day life there, you may be there a while.