Would anyone be willing to share the junior captain seniority number for each base? Couldn't find anything in my search, other than that ATL is super senior. TIA.

 

Honestly, if you are asking this question, that means you aren't on property, which means that upgrade time right now doesn't mean much for you. By the time you'd be in a position to upgrade, everything will have changed.

ATL, PHX, MCO come to mind as fairly senior. I would expect PHX to become less senior over time. MCO and ATL look like they will remain senior. OAK is junior.

 

Thanks for the general outline. While you are correct, I'm not on property, the reason I ask is for knowledge when deciding which companies to target. (Go ahead with the "get a job offer first line"...)

Just as domicile location, work rules, scope, pay rates, company financials, company culture, etc etc play into the decision of where to target employment so does upgrade potential. What you'll notice is I didn't ask "how long to upgrade to CA at x?". That indeed will change. By having the seniority number of the junior CA (or FO) at each base, coupled with mandatory retirements and projected growth, I'd argue you can get a fairly decent projection of when a domicile might become available.

So yes, I know everything can change; however, if I'm truly trying to build the full picture PRIOR to being on property this information is useful.

 

I always wondered why you shouldn’t ever ask questions unless you have a job offer. It would seem Airline pilots believe that any job is the best job. It makes sense to me to ask questions and try to work at the place that might work best for a certain situation people are in. I don’t have any of the answers either because I’m “not on property”.

 

Be sure to ask this question among all the others: which company's upgrade projection would be most greatly impacted by a change in the mandatory retirement age? The answer is not SWA...

 

Raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 wouldn’t do anything to stem the shortage. It would just kick the can down the road.

They squandered the opportunity to fix the problem when they went to 65, and screw thousands of post 9/11 furloughees in the process.

Nothing is more divisive to a pilot group than greed.


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I’m not sure about upgrade by base but SWA upgrades are approximately 10 years and not coming down soon barring something sensational. That should be enough to influence a choice if given one.

 

The original age 65 was a self-redemptive way for the Airlines to let pilots rebuild some retirement after gutting them. Now any talk of increasing the retirement age is just the greed of senior pilots at the cost of career progression for the junior ones.

The only way to fix the shortage is to build a pipeline of new pilots, not reshuffling the current ones.

 

I recently flew with a guy that was within a year of retiring. Super nice guy but definite cognitive erosion. 70? YHGTBSM

 

If not, there’s this...



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