Continental Seniority
 

Just a quick question for anyone here. I am curious what the highest seat a August, 1986 pilot hire could hold at Continental Airlines.

I was talking to a friend who is a pilot at UAL. We were discussing the rumors of a merger between UAL and Continental. While we know it is simply a rumor, we were curious where he would sit if the two companies merged. Again, he was hired by UAL in August of 1986.

Does anyone have access to the Continental seniority list? Thanks in advance.

I know for sure that a 1984 date of hire at United is good enough to hold a 777 captain line. So while I am not sure what that is at Continental, I would bet it is not as high as United. I have heard talk of some very senior (like 15 years) first officers in IAH.

Hope that sheds some light. For an exact answer, I would refer to killbill or calcapt.

Bottom 777 CA in EWR was hired in May 84
Bottom 777 CA in IAH was hired in Nov 83

Bottom 756 CA in EWR was hired June 86
Bottom 756 CA in IAH was hired April 87

Your friends date of hire would hold any CA seat in any base on the 737.

There are 15 year FO's at CAL only if they want to be FO's. Pilots with late 90's hire dates can hold CA in EWR on 737. New hires are being told 4 to 5 years to upgrade to CA with projected growth. Of course anything could happen as we know...

I don't see how knowing what a CAL 86' hire can hold has anything to do with what a UAL 86' hire could hold in the event of a merger. Any intregration of seniority list would be way more complicated then that, who bought who, payscales, carreer potential, etc. etc. etc. Would certainly take a while to work out. Hopefully this never happens as the only people who will benefit will be upper management and the lawyers and accountants who broker the deal.

Good, bad or indifferent, when UAL acquired the PAA Pacific operations in 1985, the pilot merger went straight date of hire. :)

406 out of 410 PAA pilots came in senior to me. :eek:

Thanks for the input everyone. Yea, im sure the seniority lists could be integrated many different ways. But considering they are both ALPA I would guess it would be a totally date-of-hire integration. But who knows, we could go on all day about that.

Thanks again,

FloatGeek

Actually any ALPA to ALPA mergers.............The National office at Herndon stays out of it..............because they can't fairly represent one carrier verses the other. The individual MEC's handle it.....................

Since seniority is everything in this industry, especially when growth is stagnent. most MEC's fight light you know what to protect their respective pilot groups............................as they should.

Most seniority integration is decided by an nuetral arbitrator aftet both sides hire big Gun lawyers to present their cases.

Look at what is going on at America west/ USAirways. America west has approx 1900 pilots with the most Senior pilot date of hire (DOH) around 1984. USAir has approx 4000 active (approx 2000 furloughed). The Junior active pilot at USAir has a DOH of around 1987. You can see how contentious this is. Mergers are never a simple thing and leave lasting bad blood with the newly mixed group. Just the way it is.

I don't think it will be DOH because our 98 hires are Captains and UAL's 98hires just got off the bottom of the list. A merger will not happen unless someone else does it first. Percentile merge is the only way to go.

I've seen two mergers, both with ALPA carriers; In neither case were the lists merged by date of hire. Instead, we saw a compromise taking into account career expectations. In short, nobody was happy with the result. We still have guys on the property complaining about how they were screwed in the (1986) Western merger!

Continental's seniority list is the product of many mergers that go back more than thirty years. The point is that a date-of-hire merger is simply unworkable, as some CAL pilots hired later than others are senior to their peers.

Forthermore, when the CAL and People Express pilots merged in the early 1990s, the Federal District Judge in New Jersey who ordered the arbitration (and who overturned a company-imposed list) made it practically impossible to disassemble the new seniority list and reassemble it in another order. If anybody wanted to do so, they'd have to petition his court for an order allowing that to happen.

So, if some of you United guys think you're going to take retribution on the CAL pilots who worked during the 1983-85 strike, go see Judge Politan. Good luck!

The CAL pilots have millions in their merger fund which has accumulated over the years, and they have some of the most savvy merger-wise pilots running their merger committee. Furthermore, they have one of the best airline merger lawyers on their side.

Hope and pray a merger never occurs. It will be a scene that you don't want to experince. I'm not saying that the CAL pilots will seek unfair advantage. Just don't try to screw with them. Everyone would be a lot better off if the companies stay separate.