Place your bets
 

on how long it's gonna be until we see more upgrades on the bid list.

I am guessing 2 months.

Haven't you heard Barry? We're overstaffed.

There’s immediate upgrades available. Here you go:

pilots.aa.com

First time users

and go from there.

Whats the upgrade timeline like in Vegas?

Congrats on the new AIP. Hopefully we are all Billionaires in the next decade.

After AA passes the new contract, we may potentially be looking at downgrades. It depends how hard the vacuum of AA, DAL, and UAL suck our FOs. Lately Frontier has not hired enough to even cover attrition, so if that trend continues I’d expect no upgrades for the foreseeable future, and possibly downgrades at some point.

Has anyone seen recent attrition numbers?

By the time UA gets done, the company will be in the thick of being completely awful to us. I could see people running out of the door. However, if we do keep up at 50 plus per class, I could see us stagnating, but not necessarily downgrading.

Yes. So far it’s creeping up slowly to be consistently just over 30 per month. Since the last class was added to flica we are at 22 souls lost.

It is a bit humorous that in one thread we have forced upgrades and in another thread we have forced down grades. Uhhhh interesting.


But just for humors sake…
We need to hire and retain 20ish pilots per month until the end of the year. Shouldn’t be a problem (pending attrition ballooning past 30 per month) if we push class size back up to 50-60. That is the current plan after all. Assuming just the 20ish pilots per month that’s about 10 upgrades a month starting in July. We are just under 300 bypassing upgrade? Seems feasible to me.

Worst case scenario…Once we get to sub 2 years on the upgrade and I would guess the F9 upgradeable pilot pool begins to be greatly reduced based on qualifying flight time so possible forced upgrades? Should still have plenty of FOs if hiring 50-60 per month. But if we do get a ballooning attrition problem at the same time that they can’t hire out of we won’t be able to grow due to lack of FOs and now we have possible downgrades? Bit of a pickle.

It’s an interesting thought and sounds like a fat new contract to me. The real problem is next 2 years. Between now and then we need to hire and retain about 30 pilots per month. Our current attrition and a class size of 50-60 will not allow that.

I just started tracking them on a notepad. We lost 3 people since Friday. It’s not hard to convince someone new to run out the door after they see the operation first hand.

I’m sure the operation does factor into the decision for many, but at the end of the day it’s dollars and cents. All three legacies are hiring and have upgrades available very shortly after coming on property. Meanwhile, if you choose to stay in the right seat, many FOs at legacies make more than F9 captains. Until Frontier increases their pilot contract (my bet is on 2026 for our first chance to vote, 2027 if we vote it down) I believe we will continue to bleed pilots.

We now have people at 6 plus years seniority leaving more regularly with many on the fence. It’s only going to get worse. Turns out people don’t want to be part of this initiative to be a new world regional airline when they have a decent amount of time left, paycut to leave and all.