You alluded to it yourself. There are too many moving parts for us mushrooms to make much of a guess.
The AE's are run somewhat regularly, so that in itself is not necessarily an indication one way or the other of hiring. The next AE is planned (per flight ops memo)
for late spring in the April/May timeframe. It is
rumored to be a very large bid with a 365 day conversion window. There was talk that the January '11 bid was going to be a MOAB too though and it wasn't anything epic, so who knows?
The last AE (January '11) award did mention the next bid will probably involve some base realignment of the fleets (ie Airbus to ATL) so that will probably account for a bunch of training right there as guys bid around accordingly.
The only thing that I've heard with respect to hiring is that they haven't finalized their plan for 2012 yet. Any hiring this year would supposedly be to support 2012 flying which I'm sure is a moving target with oil going nuts.
Long way of saying . . . . Who knows? On the bright side, no one is being hiring onto the list in front of you. As with any hiring cycle, the guys on the leading edge will be getting a sweet deal. The early newhires from last year are holding a line on the 320 in DTW almost out of the gate. Other guys have been on reserve for years depending on which base they ended up at.
I'd love to hear of solid hiring plans as much as anyone, but I'm not holding my breath. They seem to play it very conservatively (ie run the airline tight on staffing) but that's better than volatile hiring/furlough cycles in my opinion.