Denver
 

As a new hire, how long to hold a line in DEN? Can one get reserve in DEN right out of training?

The June awards haven’t been published yet, but the most junior line holder for May was an August ‘18 hire. I would expect that to come down a bit as pre-covid flying gets fully restored. The most Junior DEN FO is a March ‘20 hire (the last class before the world blew up). You should be able to hold any base pretty quickly if you aren’t able to get it in training. Full disclosure though... with opening new bases, the initial staffing will usually come from other bases. Denver traditionally being the hardest hit on the junior end. Denver downsizing has been talked about for a long time and it’s yet to be known if the crew positions pulled from Denver over the past year will be restored. So, if you have your heart set on Denver, be prepared for some turbulence in your relative base seniority and the possibility of being displaced to another base until you are senior enough to bid back. Also, the future is never written in stone, don’t plan on upgrading in Denver unless you plan to voluntarily stay in the right seat for 15+ years.

Thank you for the info, very helpful.

How is the Denver base looking now? I keep hearing about contraction/downsizing. I have an offer to interview, live in Denver (and don’t plan on leaving). Any current thoughts on how long to hold DEN, and what the future might hold for the base in general?

Nothing has changed in the last 3 months regarding Denver.

It’ll taken a good 16 years to be able to be DEN Captain on RSV.

If you are cool being a DEN FO, it's great. You'll move up, the flying is good, the base is large, life is good. But, upgrade time in DEN is measured in astronomical units.

Isn't that a unit of distance not time? ;)

If you get hired today, and wait for a DEN upgrade you will fly at least 5.5 million miles in the right seat before you upgrade.

That's the distance to the moon and back 10 times

I will say with the “Covid Gap” year it could be a while to get to DEN out of training. There’s guys towards the top of the 3/2020 class that haven’t been able to hold DEN yet. I know there was a big gap in time but it’s still a little bit of a back log in seniority. I’d guess it could take over a year at this point.

Close - it’s actually the distance between the center of the earth to the center of the sun. One thing I remember from astronomy class .

Thanks for the info! Upgrade time less important to me than being in Denver.

A parallax arcsecond, or parsec, is indeed a measure of distance, not time, but a certain pilot in a galaxy far, far away claims to have “made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs”. How can this be correct?

Possibly we all misunderstood his brag. The smuggling pilot might not have been referencing time, but in fact distance, as his ship was claimed to have the best Sat-Nav database in the galaxy. Able to plot a shorter path through hyperspace, without celestial collisions, using black hole-adjacent paths and exploiting what WE call “Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.”

Soooo, the unit of distance reference might, in fact, have been appropriate.

One could speak of speed of movement in my favorite velocity units, furloughs per fortnight. You could also use that for your aircraft speed, as well.

Yikes. It's under 7 years currently at UAL and I've got to assume under 16 at SWA. Just food for thought. Everyone's looking for good pilots and good people right now.

Be careful. The LIDO databases have multiple asteroid fields. Some may be duplicated....

plug in DEN is a 2010 hire for SWA CA. Should come down quite a bit, hopefully, as the base doubles in size next year with the new gate expansion.

For any FO’s that are frustrated with seniority issues in DEN I highly recommend they go to United or SWA ;)

Yeah..... im not so sure we are going to double the DEN base. Unfortunately

I took that as SWA doubling DEN not us….could be wrong though.

yeah, SWA is going to roughly double the DEN base. We have around 530/seat now. With the addition of 16 gates, the CP said we need at least 800 more pilots. It’ll be the largest base in the company.

^^^ I've been here just shy of two years now and am bidding 95% plus in DEN and can only hold 'D' or redeye reserve, working weekends. I think well over half the DEN FO list could hold CA somewhere else in the system. Only opening another western base will alleviate the DEN logjam which is what a lot of people are hoping for.

Almost seems like F9 gave up on DEN and is focusing on FL, etc.

Gave up, nah. Followed the money to FL, yea. Management has talked about getting more gates in the DEN expansion. Don’t think the plan is to grow DEN very much more though. Hard to tell.

Ahh yes, I misunderstood.

I didn't know Southwest was planning such an aggressive expansion in DEN. I wonder if both United and Southwest can run huge hubs in DEN or if they end up getting into a big, bloody turf war?

I realize that DEN can work really work for connecting traffic, but not too many airports can support multiple big airline hubs.. it'll be fun to watch play out. And Frontier will continue to scavenge for scraps.

I know that our management doesn't consider us even competing with them. It's just a different segment of the market. I think that a ULCC can coexist with a legacy just fine, but two ULCCs at one airport probably won't work out. I guess we will see how things go in MIA

I believe DEN was designed to have two more concourses and 4 more runways with probably 20 more arrivals to change at a moment's notice. So there is plenty of room for two large airline hubs.

All using the same train and broken escalators.

Lol. I can get past the escalators, but the train needs to work

This is F9’s plan to expand DEN. Sabotage the trains to B & C while our pax are redirected to the A Bridge. Offer to lease OAL gates on the cheap. Genius.

May i ask what bases are new hires getting? How long could it take to get Denver?

New Hires last month primarily Florida. Denver junior FO is less than 5 months on property. Past performance; as always is not an indicator of the future, but as an FO over the last 3 years Denver has been available within a few months of hire.
//PL

As a side note be prepared to sit reserve a long time. The bottom end of the list is very volatile but once you get about 10% of the list it's very stagnant in Denver.

I think it’s fair to say that for LAS as well. I believe if PHX ever does get out of the land of lost rumors, it too will fall into the western wasteland of seniority stagnation. On top of that, PHX opening will most likely be at the continuing draw down of DEN; and PHX will most likely be a small base 140ish crews (in-line with current base size goals of management). So keep that in mind for realistic expectations of living in the west and working at F9. It’s not bad, it’s just better to have a more honest picture of what F9s past vs future growth plans are, and how that fits with your personal future plans of where you want to live/commute too.

A base change takes 3 month though so the people that got DEN from the June 1 hire will “only” transfer to Denver on February first, so more realistically it’s 8-9-10 months depending where you are in your class seniority.

I know you know that - but not everybody does.

So over an hour hold for a gate is the new norm at 2-4 AM!

Ya get what ya pay for

Say what you want but UAL, SWA etc all had the same yesterday.

Back to landside Feb 22nd

49 minutes while sitting on the jumpseat of a DL 737 last week. Why do you under-rock-dwellers still think we are the only ones this is happening to?