What is the seat issue?

“We want many many bids”

With a Trump voice

I don't know the exact cause of our delay, but there is an industry wide shortage of first class seats. Especially the fancy lie flats that everyone wants custom made to their specs, which just stresses the supply chain issues even more.

Reading into the CRU - how is 2000+ hiring supposed to happen if there aren’t going to be many more 737 CA vacancies to cover next year?

Define “many”.

I would disregard a lot of the CRU since we have been having decent sized monthly bids for a long time. Right now the difference between numbers of FOs and Captains is less than 1% and there's no way we can retire 450 Captains and then hire 2,000+ pilots into the FO seat in 2026 and somehow that makes sense. We get over 100 deliveries in 2026. There's going to be hiring and going to be Captain upgrades. On this bid we have 2-3 year new hires getting Airbus Captain in Denver. It used to take 20 years to hold Denver Captain. Its still moving and there will still be vacancies and lots of training.

this is not all that difficult to understand.

training now is to staff to 2026 summer requirements. Yes, there may be some more small adjustments in early 2026 to address some specific needs. But by and large, the plan is to have most of 2026 needs in the bag with these bids.

any FO they hire past Feb next year is irrelevant for summer flying. So yeah - hiring 2000+ people next year can and might happen. And will trigger a 27/04 CA vacancy in the fall of 2026

How do we retire 450 CA in 2026 and hire 2,000 FOs and not have any more Captain bids? That going to create a 2,500 pilot imbalance between CA and FO current staffing. It makes no sense. Just like we heard last month that Nov was the "last bid" until fall of 2026 I bet we hear that 6 or 7 more times as each monthly bid comes out to cover retirements and aircraft deliveries.

there will be another big CA bid - in later 2026

clean up bids between now and then

Oh so all of a sudden there are more bids between now and fall 2026. Weird how just a couple pages ago we were done with bids and how there are going to be clean up bids. I bet those "clean up bids" are 100+ Captains on each bid as we have 6 or 7 of them.