LAS Base
 

Not seeing much discussed about the LAS base.
Is it going junior or senior ? Chances of getting it on the first vacancy bid during or after initial training?
Thanks

yes and yes

It is Junior in both seats, but small and done growing. Going forward it will be about how many vacant positions will be offered. Smaller bases sometimes are junior but takes awhile to get into because the isn’t much movement in and out.

The flying doesn't seem great with the high percentage of trips with red eyes, so my guess is that it will stay junior.
The ability to break seatlock early ended in the Jul vacancy bid so the churn should be slowing down after those pilots are activated over the next 1-2 months and bid out to where they actually want to be.

Thanks for your analysis, I really want a LAS base it seems that UA has the best conditions in the base at the moment, I’ll fire my App to all LAS based airlines and see who bites.

If all you care about is being based in LAS I would put UAL towards the end of your list. A lot of other carriers offer better QOL and scheduling flexibility and have a stronger presence.

Better QOL? Not so sure that is the case right now over at LUV. One thing UAL has over every single other carrier with a LAS base is the potential to fly WB to other continents (albeit if willing to commute). The growth of the UAL LAS base has been stunted precisely because a lot of the locals would rather fly WB than be locally based (think about what that says about WB flying). So far I’ve met a couple of LAS crews and most of them actually commute to LAS (for the seniority and easy commute). The trip mix so far is apparently sub par, but that’s to be expected in a pretty small base. I think it will grow, albeit very slowly.

The way the OP worded his post it sounded like he wants to be based in LAS, not just live there and commute elsewhere. If he doesn't have WB aspirations I'd look at Frontier or Spirit. You can fly a modern airbus with better trips. You can actually trade or drop a trip there and won't soon be forced to upgrade if you don't want to either.

I didn’t infer that he wanted to commute, I just pointed out that a lot of LAS folks who have a choice actually do so. My top choice when applying to the majors was LUV, for very similar reasons to what the OP implied. Knowing now what I didn’t know then, UAL would easily be my top choice this time around. And dropping/trading trips at UAL is easy if you ask the right questions when you hit the line. (For example - short trips are much easier to drop).

This takes seniority though. If you're junior you won't be able to get day trips or two days if the majority of your base is flying is 3/4 days.

Seniority certainly helps with anything. And bidding a junior base helps with seniority (LAS is currently the most junior UAL base by a considerable margin). For comparison, I’d be at about 50% for LAS 737 CA and around 70% in DEN. And in my NB and WB bidding/trading experience, shorter 1-2 day trips go fairly junior in PBS awards.

You will not fly better trips at NK vs UAL. Especially out of LAS.

once the company gets their new provision to force new hires to be captains, LAS will disappear. They simply opened it up to get butts in the left seat, now that they can force guys into the left seat wherever they want them LAS will go buh-bye

That’s a pretty bold prediction. Closing a base costs the company a lot of money, when I came aboard people thought that was why CLE hadn’t closed. CLE has grown in the last couple of years. I doubt many people will be forced into CA, but I’m confident we will see new hires being awarded LAS from Indoc once WB new hires can no longer bid there to break their initial seat locks.

CLE has grown because they can get captains there.

Well, yeah. Same with a few other bases too, including MCO. LAS is going to be interesting to watch, the last tidbit I saw from the Co was that they didn’t see much LAS base growth coming. I tend to agree, but they are a long ways from closing it.

Extremely unlikely, Las wasn’t opened solely to get butts in seats. Consider the fact that most people who came to LAS originally were already on the 737 as a captain or lateraled from another aircraft. What’s far more likely is a massive displacement in IAH captains.

what was LAS all about if not butts in seat?

It also promotes recruiting of new hires, provides an alternate location from which to cover SFO, LAX, and DEN flying, and saves the company buying a token number of hotel rooms.

Space to park the shear number of jets showing up that eventually won’t all be able to be staffed by normal overnighting crews. Vegas only has 100 captains almost all filled by lateral captain bids. IAH on the other hand grew by nearly 350 new captains.
The company unnecessarily grew IAH to get butts in seats. Before the company decided to do that lax was projected to be staffed to 340 captains. Now only 220. They sent all the unfilled LAX/SFO/EWR positions to IAH and smaller degree DEN to get butts in seats. Only
time will tell whether the company really wants 700+ captains in IAH, it was definitely a move to alleviate the unfilled CA vacancy problem though.

[QUOTE=AirportJunkie;3692951]Vegas only has 100 captains almost all filled by lateral captain bids. [\QUOTE]

Yeah - I suspect that is considered a failure. The goal for sure was to promote upgrades.

[QUOTE=TFAYD;3692994]I would agree the company thought they could promote upgrades by opening Vegas but I also don’t think that was the sole purpose either after having listened to Zachs town hall when it was announced.