MTlife, thank you for the response. The more I'm learning about all this the more I want to buy you guys and gals a beer with all the items you all have to go through to get hired. This is quite the process.

They won't give you a list of what is available, you will only be given the opportunity to bid on all the pilot positions in the company, available and unavailable. So you can place your top bid for MSP900CA, but you won't get it.

Web500sjc, thanks for the information. That makes sense. Appreciate the response!

You will have 9 choices available, and you bid as specified above. If you want ATL above all, then I would bid thusly:

1 ATL 200
2 MSP 200
3 DTW 200
4 LGA 200
5 JFK 200
6 MSP 900
7 DTW 900
8 LGA 900
9 JFK 900

You *might* get #1. You won't get #2, #3 is more possible, and 4 & 5 pretty likely. #6 you'd only get if Hillary went to prison tomorrow, but you don't want 6, 7, 8, or 9 because you want ATL, and there are no 900s in ATL for the near future.

But if you get 2, 3, 4, or 5, you can easily bid to #1 on the next bid or two.

If one ultimately wanted to base in Atlanta because they lived there, are you saying that the order in which you placed these, in the case of wanting Atlanta, the 200, are you saying in your opinion that is the best order as far as you are concerned? Minny over Detroit, Detroit over LaGuardia, etc, if you don't get Atlanta right out of the gate?

The order of 2 through 5 doesn't matter if you want to be ATL based, as long as all the 200s are above the 900s. 2 through 5 is just what you would find to be the best commute from ATL. For that, As much as I hate it, NYC would probably be the best because you have every other non delta airline on the route somehow. MSP and DTW are only Delta to Delta hub route routes. Which probably means a 2 leg commute, since Delta will have the only nonstops, and those will be filled with Delta nonrevs. As far as flying out of ATL as a nonrev, the more non delta flights you can get, the better the commute.

While all of this is true, I have never NOT gotten to where I needed from ATL. Just flew from ATL to DTW yesterday, got on the first try. Had 5 empty seats on the MD88 I was on.

Not saying it is easy, cuz it's not. ATL is probably one of the worst airports to commute in and out of, particularly hub-to-hub like you mentioned. But what else would you expect from the WORLD'S busiest airport? 80% of America's airports are reachable within 2 hours of ATL.

All great input folks. Thanks for posting for me to get a better understanding of how this all could work out. The visual depiction of the possible options really helped out and the reasoning behind it made a lot of sense. Thanks for posting!

FYI, entire new hire class of 34 got either JFK or LGA.

Actually both Southwest and Spirit fly from ATL to DTW also... And they are both typically better options than Delta on that route.