Upgrades should come down when we hit the bubble of years no one was hired in

Agreed. 2008-2013 saw hiring for attrition and very small growth towards the end. It was a 5 year veritable dry spell. There are, however, plenty of AirTran folks who were put into that seniority range during the merger, so it may not be as sunny as many think for their upgrade time.
I will put in another plug for myseniority.com. It is a huge resource and the guy putting it together and updating it has my eternal thanks. If you are an active employee, it lets you see where you fall in the grand upgrade scheme.

Thanks for the update.

If we are planning to hire 700+ pilots next year, when you do your myseniority.com plan, be sure to do it right or else garbage in = garbage out.

In other words, don't put the "airline growth" under growth. It's the pilot seniority list growth. Just for the ease of math, 700 new pilots out of 9500 is 7.4% growth of the seniority list. Currently, upgrades are at 60% on the master seniority list. The kicker is, at some point we're gonna stop hiring, so your retirement numbers won't be accurate, but if you pick a point in the reasonably near future, you'll get a rather accurate picture of where you'll stand especially considering upgrade time.

Agreed. I check it every single month after the bid closes to see where I would sit in other domiciles, how many numbers from the most junior captain etc. Another third party app / site that I couldn’t live without.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good point. So that forecast is good for about a year provided the hiring numbers go as planned. I have a hard time imagining that they’ll continue to hire 700 per year indefinitely because the retirement numbers don’t call for that kind of hiring. At some point they’ll get to the total number of pilots they want and then only hire for attrition.

To your point the website doesn’t accurately reflect that. It would be cool if you could tell it grow at 7.5% until January 2020 then grow at 1%. Something like that for a more realistic picture. But it’s free, so I’m not complaining. [emoji1]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here’s a sample run for a 2015 plug hire.



That’s roughly for 700-800 pilots hired per year until then.

Realistic or not?

I was in new hire 2 years ago and they told us the growth plan for the airline was for 12,000 pilots by 2022. So that would be 625 a year for the next 4 years. I know a lot may have changed since then but so far it looks to be holding true.

I generally play around with the numbers and try to use an average going forward. 3-4 percent is fairly safe and would account for a hiring slow down at some point either due to economic reasons or internal reasons. I assume at that point, the upgrades will also start trending towards the 55 percent range.
Looking at aircraft deliveries going forward, you have to assume that we are going to grow at a glacial clip for the next few years, anyway, even if many of those acquisitions are for 700 retirements.
I just flew a China Eastern 700 on my last trip that we have owned for less than 3 months (the cigarette tar stains on the overhead panel are a dead giveaway), so we are still slowly acquiring used airplanes as well.

Don’t forget to subtract for retirements