Im sure they plan on getting more... We will see. Im pretty sure in the coming years, MCO, ATL and DFW will be the biggest bases for us.

 

I'm new to 121 pax and gate expansion. With F9 only having the 2 gates in E terminal how would they go about getting more gates? That E terminal looks pretty full most of the time. With the JB and Spirit merge could we anticipate getting space there if Spirit shrinks DFW as Ihear they are?

Ref

 

DFW plans on adding more gates. You can buy them. lease/share them with another carrier. etc. You also have to show a use for the gates and have a certain percentage of use in order to keep them. Ie- why Delta always parks plans at every gate all the time in ATL even if not in use. But in ATL, we also have gates that are OURs, but we share with Delta and they pay us for it. Then there are "community" type gates where you basically get a slot and so do a lot of other airlines. I think the best example of that is in DEN, there are a couple gates that international carriers also come into.

 

When I was getting out of skw, CR7 parked at the E gates. Both in the high E gates on the main concourse, as well as that terrible satellite concourse opposite the Frontier/Spirit gates. Envoy 145 were also using mostly those satellite gates. As they took more and more of them offline and shifted flying to skw, it seemed like we were parking more and more at those remote gates and sometimes at B. All the gates tended to be full with long waits, but as those E145 got reduced I noticed gates were always open.

pure speculation but I could see us easily taking some more of the main E gates and those skw planes getting pushed out to the remote E20s.

 

I am starting at F9 in a couple months and I am looking for more insight regarding the DFW base. I realize the base is still not quite open, but when is it expected to become more junior? I see on FFTpilots that the junior FO award hasn't been updated in a couple months. Are new hires still primarily going to Miami and Las Vegas? How soon are you able to change your base after initial assignment?

Could a new hire this summer reasonably expect DFW within the first few months? I know that all the new flight attendant classes are for DFW only but I assume pilot staffing is a different story.

 

I think there's only been one bid on DFW. Senior people tend to have a wait and see, so it's almost impossible to predict how senior it will go, but overall on the FO side, things keep moving and anything is attainable fairly quickly.

 

As of the latest vacancy bid, the most most Junior FO DFW award was a 12/27/22 hire

 

From what I was told in recurrent, they want 120 pilots total this year for DFW. If it turns out to be 60 and 60, then we only have 20 more slots left. So just depends on the movement in and out of DFW to get a spot.

 

We apparently have E10 now as well. So 3 lol.

 

Any estimation on the seniority of DFW is pure speculation at this point. Perhaps by the end of the year we’ll have enough data to see a definitive trend, but really I expect the metrics will fluctuate while the base is being established.

DFW more than tripled in block hours from May to June. If you look at the Top 15 Station table on fftpilots.com you’ll find Dallas historically does quite well. It’s sitting at #6 for June 2023 and it’s been somewhere in the ranking for almost every month since Jan 2022. We do a fair amount of departures out of there, despite limited gate space and the target is growth but no one really has a reliable crystal ball. There’s more rumors here than you can shake a stick at. I wouldn’t bet on anything.

As far as base bidding, the system bid is redone every month. I had my destination awarded with just 5 months of seniority and three of those months were training. Some sit in Vegas waiting for their desired base. My strategy was to shrink the commute, which resulted in spending a month in PHL (most of which was IOE) and a month in MIA first. It worked okay but each month was RSA short call. In hindsight it would’ve been easier to stay in PHL until getting MCO or TPA, but I was expecting a longer wait and wanted a FL base ASAP. Miami had nicer ‘winter’ weather too so I’m not bitter about it.

Don’t expect anything as a new hire except a paycheck. When I interviewed, new hires were getting Florida based on the first bid. When I arrived on property, it was mostly Vegas with the highest third getting PHL. Right now the drops are for Vegas. Next week we could see NH going to Dallas. It’s futile to plan on anything in the very beginning.