This may be a big help since we will lose to BNA from ATL personally I still think you will be getting the desired base fairly quickly and won’t have to worry about it for the first month out of training anyway.

Goos luck and welcome.

Start this week and I have been wondering the same about HOU... I live 20 min from the airport and having to commute from it while waiting for a spot is gonna make me tear up everytime I go to work haha.

Looking at our domicile senioroty tools, depending on when you get here in March, as of today you would be somewhere between 500-600 seniority numbers from the most junior FO in ATL. However, with BNA opening up, certainly there will be lots of movement around ATL, DAL, MDW, MCO, and BWI. So, you'll need to see how all of that shakes out first to get a good read on your chances. Movement will always exist but by July movement will slow down to some extent since nobody else is coming in the door.

The good news though is that if you can't get to ATL, BWI is our most junior base and MDW and MCO are not far behind, and you will certainly get one of those by Month 2 if not right away, so your commute would not be that bad. And this hiring freeze will not last forever.

HOU is moderately senior on the FO side right now. As of today's numbers, when you get here next week, you will be approximately 800 seniority slots from the most junior FO in HOU. Until hiring picks back up or unless they shift a lot of positions to HOU, you will probably not get to HOU for awhile. But as quick as we announced no more hiring things can swing the other way. Hang tight and you'll eventually get there.

Honestly you never know month to month. LAX was bookended for a long time with senior bubbas from TX who wanted to fly ETOPS instead of chasing TX thunderstorms or MDW schenanigans, new hires, and wedged in the middle are 20+ bypassing FOs and a reasonable number of new CAs, some who chose LAX and some who are here because they picked first available. Thing is... At one point even while sending LAX new folks they involuntarily displaced about a dozen LAX FOs and CAs. Considering there were only a few hundred total in base, it was a surprisingly high percentage even though the overall number wasn't terribly high. It took some of those folks months to get back.

The point is you never know how seniority is going to work out with base bids, even in places where you can make a pretty reasonable big-picture guess about how things will work out. As an example, I was surprised a few months ago to see the junior CA in system was at MDW. Didn't expect that. As others have said, once BNA opens there will be a big shuffling and I'd bet every base will have some openings for relatively junior pilots as people hop around. SWA seems to have a whole lot of pilots who play tourist with their base bid and I'm cool with that, but it means any time something new and shiny happens you get a bunch of movement which can be awesome for our junior pilots. This stuff comes and goes and you gotta ride with it.

Regarding how SWA is with basing compared to other airlines and options a new hire may have... I haven't heard one thing to inform me that we're any worse than any other airline. I have heard however that we are one of only a handful that seem to predictably run a base vacancy bid every single month even when hiring is slow, upgrades are slow, and the numbers are really small. That's totally a good thing in our favor in my opinion and not all airlines do that.

One thing I noticed also... Our seat lock rules changed just a bit in a way that could make it slightly less desirable for pilots to switch bases just to get a better vacation bid. I can't remember the exact wording but I distinctly remember thinking that it would likely kill off a good chunk of the base swapping for the sole purpose of enhancing vacation bidding. The results of that haven't been seen yet but I think we'll see some vacancy result differences this year just prior to vacation bidding.

Captains downgrading to FO are seat locked for six months, instead of the previous contract's four months. FO's can still jump around unhindered for whatever reason they deem necessary.

Given that new hires are overwhelmingly going to BWI, and that the music is about to stop in a few weeks... How long, realistically, to hold OAK for a new hire?

Almost as soon as you want to. OAK is not nice for commuters so there ought to be at least one person trying to bid out at any given time.

I appreciate the insight! Gives me some ability to manage my expectations going through training... and thankfully I get a new chance to try every month haha

No problem. I have been in your shoes and it wasn't that long ago. As a matter of fact take my opinions lightly considering that I don't have 1/20th of the experience that some of the others do here. For example it sound like flensr has some good advice a few posts up. Seniority is a weird thing and what makes statistical sense this month can take a complete reversal just a few months down the road.