It just won’t be backfilled, often that means it just stays the same, at least that’s how it’s been in ORD on some fleets

Music to my ears (mid April class date, hoping for SFO 737 CA)... Fingers crossed!

They don't have a clue beyond about six months, and I'm being extremely generous. Their plans could change in six weeks, and a change in six days wouldn't be unheard of, either. (I wish I was joking.)

they also do this to limit backfills. Like someone said, look at CA vacancies

It’s not shrinking on this vacancy, meaning max=min=# of active pilots. If they wanted to shrink it, the min would be a lower number to prevent secondary vacancies. It has been less than 200 at times and more than 300 over the last few years. Why those longer term trends happen is only a guess unless they tell us in a CRU.

And in 2404V DCA 737 CA opened at 276, now it is holding at 301. So overall that is more DCA 737 growth than shrinkage (sts). Until the company can narrow the much, much bigger CA/FO gaps elsewhere I wouldn't expect any big 737 FO vacancies in DCA. But, the base is not shrinking and is an obvious candidate for growth the next few years. This is because it has more currently available and upcoming additional capacity than any other hub besides maybe DEN.

Captain slots definitely tell the story in the longer term right now.

In SFO for instance, they know they will end up with a bunch of unfilled 737 Cap assignments , but they don't need to advertise the 737 FO assignments yet. This is because they will assign all the unfilled Captain assignments to New Hires that will end up being 737 FOs for the next year. When all of those folks become eligible to actually go to 737 Captain school (or actually slightly before) you will see a bunch of new hires getting 737 FO assignments in SFO to replace the upgrading pilots

nothing is shrinking….step back from the ledge….the company just wants to move the chess pieces where they want. They don’t want to have 787 training right now so they drop the FO level so there are no backfills. They don’t want IAH 737 FO to be undermanned by 100+ going into summer so they reduce DCA FO slots so there won’t be backfill.

If you haven’t been here long just relax as someone mentioned above they will post 50+ vacancies for DC when they are ready.

or they will be backfilling those FO slots with more new hire captains that start as FOs as prior new hire CA bid out making SFO FO hard to bid into? Going “senior”?

If you haven’t been here long just relax as someone mentioned above they will post 50+ vacancies for DC when they are ready.[/QU

Ok, trying to Relax, I got lost in the matrix but thanks for summing this up in pilot terms!

In Unity...