He's right. If you want to come to Spirit for the DFW base, that isn't a good idea. DFW is a shrinking base, and the company just displaced a massive amount of pilots out of it. They have no plans to grow it, at least in the short term, while Frontier is expanding. Who knows what JetBlue plans on doing?

 

he made it sound like it wasn’t going to exists anymore after jetblue takes over. And that isn’t true. Nobody knows what will happen.

 

What JBLU does with DFW, DTW, and ORD is completely different than what Spirit intends/intended to do. Simply, Spirit does not know how to compete in non leisure markets against legacy carriers, so they decided to take staffing out of non leisure cities and put them in leisure cities, they are a 1 trick pony.

Main question is; does JBLU see a market in non leisure cities to grow and go up against legacy carriers or will they continue to saturate the Florida market and Northeast? Being that they have stated the first part of that question is in fact, their plan, and the second part of the question is not possible because of lack of space, I would guess JBLU plans to grow/keep some of the displaced NK markets. Do they keep DFW and IAH? Who knows. But what I do know if they need bases in the central US with the forecasted size, there is no more room in the NE and Florida for more crews, they have stated that. They have also said LAS will remain to have aprox the same amount of flights as JBLU and NK operates currently, so LAS would probably remain the same. LAX will probably become a NK base this year and JBLU will combine the base day 1 with theirs. I doubt any new bases will be added from this point on that JBLU doesnt give a blessing to.

But I think its shortsighted to look at what NK has done and assume that JBLU will take the same action; they are 2 different airlines with different clientele and brand. Basically "past performance is not indicative or future results"

 

yup, this is spot on!

 

Sure, but at best DFW is a giant question mark. Frontier is growing it, AA and WN have Dallas fortress hubs and aren’t going anywhere. I don’t even think JetBlue management knows what will happen to DFW. If DFW is important for you long term, don’t come to Spirit.

 

I would be willing to bet JetBlue has already drawn up what they envision their route and crew network to look like from the onset into the first 5 years or so, they have to. You can’t merge two airlines and see how it goes. What the long term, read 5+ years, looks like for DFW? Well no base is really safe outside of a fortress hub, so nobody should ever think any base is safe for long term. So your advice about not coming to DFW if you need DFW is good advice,
but that can be said for a lot of bases. F9 just opened DFW but they also love to close bases. All part of the joyous career

 

How soon after training could I get IAH?

 

Guys in my class got Houston on second bid during training. Very possible.

 

You should be able to get it while in training. If not maybe a few months. Kinda went junior on the FO side

 

I know FLL is a junior base, most folks I’ve talked to in recent classes have been assigned LAS during training. What’s the likelihood FLL can be had prior to wrapping up training?