KC10- you may be on to something, and my reasoning is this:

At the time the larger aircraft (I'm not goin to go so far as to say 767s to newhires again- yet) were being awarded to noobs, we were making a dramatic shift to widebody flying.

This same shift is apparently planned to occur again.

The first few classes will very likely end up with a mix of 88, 9, 320, and 73N slots.

I imagine NYC, DTW, and MSP will make up the majority of those slots, with possible ATL or LAX.

Will all the openings be offered to current employees via A/E's before they're given to new hires? In other words, do the new hires just get the left over positions?

Of course. There will be a AE prior to the first class being offered a seat. It may be this AE or it may be the Aug one. It all depends on when they start their first class.

It will depend. Wil guys with lines want to go to NYC ERB and sit reserve. The reserve rules have not changed that much.

The difference with this widebody increase is that because of the 20 year fence at NWA you had a large number of NWA guys who could not fly the widebodies. I suspect that those fNWA guys who could not fly the equipment before will go to it now, even if it is NYC.

I disagree. The NWA pilot group isnt that hard up on commuting just to fly big metal. We have very senior pilots in dc9 and 320 spots because they choose to be for QOL.

Don't forget that with the 7ER flying comes 7ER reserve for the junior people, which can be a the bottom 20% or so when things are slow in the winter... International short-call is 24 hours long. Last month I got to enjoy a 0400 to 0400 reserve... It's always fun to sit in the crashpad 36 hours or so to cover 1 short call.

Yep.... the fence came down in 2006. It's been 4 years now....

That was then.

On the last bid I couldn't get better than the 88. No way will a newbie see 320s, 73s or 67s. And no way will they see LAX or SLC, I can't get those now.

Since the last AE had around 40 fDAL guys who live in SLC get displaced to other bases due to the 90/320 swap, I doubt any newhires will get SLC for awhile. I think it will be awhile before newhires get something west of MSP. Hope I'm wrong, but we have lots of west coast guys that are now commuting east due to the displacements from the last couple of bids.