There have been a few surprises on the last bid with regard to seniority. Obviously SEA, SLC, and LA have gone and will likely remain fairly senior, probably due to the fact that there are more guys that live/commute from western cities than there are positions in western bases.
Wouldn’t think you can hold any of those until you have some numbers under you, much less out of class.
CVG is pretty junior right now on the bottom of the list, but I think that can be pinned on base closure paranoia - and will not likely hold through the next bid that closes the 767 ER base. The vast majority of pilots based here live here or near here, and it will likely get pretty senior when we go from having 500ish pilots to 250ish pilots.
DTW may actually go surprisingly senior. Many of the prospective displacements from CVG are talking about bidding big metal in DTW (its only a 3-5 hour drive from CVG metro to DTW airport, depending on where in CVG you live.) The majority of the (DTW) base commutes from what I hear (surprise!) but it seems like a decent place to commute to from a lot of places (and cheap to find a crashpad/hotel in,) and there is a fair amount of heavy metal up there. Also consider that the junior 9 driver in DTW is senior to the junior 9 driver in MSP. I wouldn’t rule it out as being available to new-hires.
ATL seems to be middle of the road. Many were predicting mass migration from the north to ATL on the last bid, but that didn’t seem to happen, despite a bid that lent itself to that possibility. It has been assigned out of class before (on a fairly regular basis,) but there were also some folks that were involuntarily displaced out of there on the August 09 bid (me being one of them.) That being said, it looks like anyone that wanted it back has been reinstated. Wouldn’t rule it out for newhires, but It might not happen that frequently.
MEM seems to be a little more senior that either DTW or MSP, but the junior pilot there is still only 66 from the bottom of the big list, and it was being handed out in training last go-around, from what I understand.
MSP seems to be a surprise on the junior side. In fact, they have the second most junior “bottom pilot” category at the company (Bottom 5 pilots are NYC M88, - #6 is MSP DC9) That could change with the DC9 displacements on the next bid. However, crew resources indicated that there would only be about 100 total additional displacements from the DC9 (50ish ca, 50ish FO.) There are projected to be about 100 crews (200 pilots) left in MSP after the current displacements (from Dec 11 bid) are complete - so the next displacement (May 2010 bid,) won’t close the category, even if MSP was the only base they displaced from. That displacement will likely be offset by an increase in the MD88 category to fund the incoming 90's. Also, the last displacement off the ‘9 was larger than the upcoming one, and pilots were still able to AE into the DC9.
I imagine non one would have troubles getting M88 NYC, though they are overstaffed as of right now (about 35% of the category is on reserve.) I don’t know if that is for the planned hub at LGA or for the bases’s conversion to a 90 qualified category (will likely happen on the May bid,) or both - or what effect the LGA deal falling through would have on it.
If I had to hazzard a guess as to what would be available in training, I would say (in order of most to least likely, biggest to smallest quantitity.) M88 NYC, DC9 MSP, DC9 DTW, DC9 MEM, M88 MSP, M88 ATL. Maybe 320 DTW/MSP, 737 NYC