Somebody posted an excel sheet on the potato farm, showed 8 years and one month for LGB CA.

Hmmmm, maybe you have/ they have friends in high places and you have advanced knowledge of the yearly system bid that won't be out for another week or there's a 8 yr CA that's doing a temporary base trade with someone in LGB? But as of the last quarterly system bid ( move date of DEC) the last CA to get into LGB is a MAR/APR ' 07 hire.

Or I need to check my emails:D

Doesn't really matter for the people trying to decide between JB and AL now really, does it?

It most definitely does... For a west coast person, upgrade time plays a massive role in the decision process. If I had job offers from both and wanted to remain west of the Mississippi, I’d weigh upgrade time up there with most other metrics. Money in the bank, dude!

And... LGB upgrade is definitely NOT 8 years. 12 for the lowball reserve plug. The seagull is wise.

4 yr upgrade for SFO Airbus at AS right now. Maybe another bid in Spring. Hired/hiring 300 this year and next.

Off course upgrade time matters, but the people upgrading now were hired over a decade ago. Using that number to make a prognosis about upgrade time for future hires is not an exact science. Our upgrade in DTW went from 10 to 2 years in one class because of no hiring for 4 years and all DTW FOs were where they wanted to be. If you want to make a (more?) educated guess you need to look at standing bids, forecast retirements and forecast growth (and hope and pray nothing else changes in the next decade). Conservative option: pick a company (and hope it picks you back) where you want to work, unless the upgrade is below 3 years, results from the past don't matter.

That upgrade was 2000 of 3000 pilots. I think the results point more to luck, the desirability of SFO, and reserve QOL than anything else.

Since Alaska doesn't allow us to see standing bid preferences, we'll know if it was an anomaly or an actual trend when the next bid comes out.

How do you define a trend? In the 4+ years I’ve been here it’s “trended” down from 12 to 4 years. In the last 2 years, it’s gone from 5 to 4 years. All things being equal, the same percentage of those who bypass will continue to bypass. If the upgrade is hovering around 4 years during a period of .02% growth, I would think that trend would continue in the upcoming .04% growth year/s.

In the 4+ years you have been here age 65 got into full swing and Alaska has had unprecedented growth because of their reaction to Delta's growth in Seattle. We've also merged with another airline which has bases that most of the ANC and SEA pilots would compare to Mogadishu.

Now that we've settled into the usual 3% growth per year that AAG feels comfortable with, I'd say that its a trend if the upgrade stays at 4 years for longer than 1 year.

I think we're saying the same thing. It has stayed sub 5 for the last yr and has been inching closer to 4 for a while. Even before integration. We've hired more this year, (and are told we're hiring the same next year), than we've ever hired before. We just had the largest upgrade bid in our history. Prior to that, the previous 4 years saw unprecedented hiring with 200-250 a yr. (Minus 1 yr of only 150ish). So we're "trending" towards shorter upgrade times and more hiring. This is not purely based on the minimal attrition we've had. If the same factors are in play for the foreseeable future. I can't see the percentage of bypasses changing keeping upgrades around 4, maybe sub 4 yrs.