I doubt they'll be on reserve in 5 years. Either enough people will have left, or enough people will have said "Screw this" and quit. 2016 is a long ways off, and several majors are gonna have to either hire or shrink massively by then.

I agree that it probably won't be 5 years but it will be the better part of 5 years to run through those 900 or so jet fo's on the list.

Yup. It's going to be permanent reserve for 9L guys.

I'd risk permanent reserve to get my PIC and get out of here. That is the whole point isn't it? They are junior now but they'll now be senior to all FOs here because they will get hired to a better place before every other FO here can even sniff an hour of PIC.

Very true. With most legacies retiring thousands over the next 5-10 years, that PIC will help them go to the next level faster than the senior jet FOs.

By my reasoning, it is absolutely possible that this happened within seniority. Starting at the top of the roster going down, you're initially going to have a Q quota not filled. So IAH being much more preferable to EWR, the first bids you can award any Q spots to will be 9L guys, who will probably have IAH before EWR. That goes on until the quota is met, then now you can go back to the top of the list, and start down, IAH vacancies are gone, so EWR gets the rest. Seems to me to be exactly how the quota system was meant to operate. You can't look ahead to the end of the bid, say "the quota will have been met by the end, so I'll just award the first seat to anybody," because then you will be awarding Q seats to somebody before the quota is met.

I do want to go on record as saying that I'm not sure that the quotas are really in the spirit of "one list, one voice" to begin with, but I wasn't part of that decision. It's more like "one list, one voice - except for those guys."

i agree, that where alot of us are now, and are grateful for the upgrade before this stuff...ill take 2-3 on reserve to leave in less then another 5-10 years.