Agree Zap. Though for people hired today I don't believe the upgrade will be 10+ years but anything is possible.

Additionally, even if the upgrade was 10 years; since when did that become a LONG time to upgrade?!?!

That's my point. Legacy upgrade times have traditionally been lengthy. There will always be the lucky few who caught it at the right time and managed a 5 year upgrade. They're few and far between.

If we are looking at the quick upgrades at Delta, I guess you have to ask yourself this... if there is an upgrade that 6000 first officers choose to bypass - is it really an upgrade you want?


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If you live in domicile, the chance to pull down 250 large and put up with a few shenanigans on reserve ain't so bad. After you've had it and paid off all your debt and burned the mortgage choose a nice seat as an FO.

I would expect upgrade times to maybe slightly increase, then drop. If you look at the seniority list, after the AT purchase but before 2015 there was very little hiring. Also, senior FOs make great money and have great schedules, and reserve is still pretty brutal, so I'd expect more FOs to bypass. For those hired 2015 and later, 7 year upgrade could be realistic. SWA does actually have retirements that start to increase around 2023 onwards, or 5-7 years from someone hired today.

My guess is all the hiring is for better manning and increased growth.
It's cheaper to pay Premium pay to an existing employee then to hire another to pay both straight time. I get the feeling SW is gearing up for a major expansion.

Agreed. Wonder if a new type is coming?

I keep hearing from multiple sources that the goal is 12,000 pilots by 2022. So I went to myseniority.com to see the seniority list growth rate graph. That's roughly 7% seniority list growth rate by 2022. Please don't pay attention to numbers beyond 2022 as data becomes gibberish, as in no we most likely won't have 45000 pilots on the property by your retirement date. :)

We currently have right around 9,000 pilots on the property. Within that same time frame, we will be retiring around 600 pilots according to SWAPA retirement schedule. That means that in order to achieve the 12,000 mark, we'll need to hire 3,600 pilots over the next 5 years, or 720 per year.

Bear in mind, this is also assuming 0 early-outs, nor does it include any other factors such as people reaching the 18 year mark and having 5 weeks of vacation as opposed to 4.

This brings me to our upgrade times. Current junior captains are right around 60-61% on the master seniority list. Using that same seniority percentage, depending on when one was hired, the data seems to support a 5-7 year upgrade for those hired during this wave of hiring. For me personally, it falls just shy of 6 years on the property.

Now... this is all assuming organic growth, i.e. no mergers.

If we were to merge with someone, keep their pilots and dump their aircraft a'la AirTran, forget these numbers...

If we were to introduce a new aircraft type and keeping it organic, these numbers will likely get even better as it would require more hiring which would mean even quicker upgrade.

Who knows what will happen... but I do believe something is up as I know Southwest doesn't blow 9 figures on building facilities they don't fully intend to use to their max potential.

Bank on another M&A event in the next 12-24 months, so you can pretty much throw out any upgrade projections unless you are due to upgrade within that timeframe. I'd love to believe that the new sim building is for organic growth, but I've been here long enough to know better unfortunately and I've seen this before the AirTran acquisition and all signs point to another "merger". Even money on a JetBlue, Alaska, or Hawaiian merger in the not too distant future.

So based on this post is it safe to say we can throw out the projections on myseniority.com, or is this a one sided thesis?

My seniority.com is a tool and a snapshot in time. As of today, those projections if nothing changes are probably pretty close. As we all know, nothing in this industry stays the same. Change is constant, so I'm just adding my take to temper any expectations that what my seniority.com says today may not reflect what happens 1,5, even 10 years down the road, that's all.