That was a good explanation of the old UAL and the new CBA about the process of back-filling the secondary awards.

With the contract language following:

Current CBA

8-C-4 Awarding of Vacancies Upon closing of a vacancy bulletin, pilots shall be awarded the number of advertised primary vacancies. At the same time, pilots may be awarded secondary vacancies that have become available due to the awarding of the advertised primary vacancies. Further, awards may be made to fill the vacancies resulting from all subsequent awards. Secondary vacancies shall be awarded to ensure the published minimum number of positions are maintained for all Categories. These secondary vacancies shall not have been advertised, but shall share the same effective date as the primary vacancies.

 

Ha ha ha.

However, with the vast majority of L-UAL pilots over the age of 50+, it'll be nice for some of them to actually get 4 stripes before they retire.

Last week there was a 51 year old A320 FO in the FPA with around a 11000 seniority number. Yikes!

 

Hahaha ha... Maybe he is a mil retiree who spent the last couple of decades fighting a couple of wars, now drawing a 70K pension, not giving a **** about what seat he sits in. Yikes, dbag.

 

As a general rule, if you were in the bottom third of your pre-merger list, and over the age of 50, you probably didn't have a high expectation long-term, and the merger just exacerbated that, especially if you were on the UAL side because of a 7 year difference in average age of pilots in the bottom three deciles (tenths) of both groups.

 

Free Flyer,

What of it? I'm a 55 year old 320 FO and have I've been flying 121 for 28 years. I've got over 10,000 hours of 121 PIC in both turbo shakers and Boeing AC. BFD! Flying as Captain is great from a paycheck perspective but it doesn't amount to squat from a professional one.

This industries machinations have derailed the career path of thousands of pilots with far more substantial quals than mine. Pretty unseemly for you to besmirch older pilots behind you on the SLI just because the industry have dealt them a lousy hand. Suggest you re-read "Hard Landing" by T. Petzinger and temper your commentary with some historical perspective. Your future F/O's may appreciate it.

petzinger - hard landings - AbeBooks

I used to fly with ex PAN AM and TWA pilots who were flying the tracks when I was sucking a binky. I once had an Eastern WB Captain as my F/O. I never once impugned their career by their age or lack of a fourth stripe.

Sorry for the vitriol and flying spittle, the but reading some of the recent tripe here by the "grow a pair" crowd (MEL APU over the Amazon) has raised my hackles. Battles already fought and won have been micturated upon by some and it really chaps my rectal region.

 

Flyers post was in response to an equally bad taste post. I'm sure it was not aimed at you.

 

Looking at the award, it appears there were some categories that were backfilled well above the published min staffing numbers.

With the SFO 400 F/O the min/max were 60 numbers apart, and with the shift of flying back to ORD the SSC indicated the company was planing to allow the "surplus" to decrease with these bids. It sure looks like the company issued backfill awards to cover a majority of the SFO 400 F/O's that bid off.

SP

 

Yet there are those on the L-CAL side that are fuming over that same pilot ending up where he is on the list. Pilots that in many cases are in line to retire at or near the top of the pile anyway.

 

Is this possible? How could there be a LUAL A320 FO with a seniority number of 11,000? Could this have been a new hire?

 

No. If you look at the award of the bottom 100 pilots, 85 of them were LUAL and only 15 LCAL. As a matter of fact, the bottom 1/3 of the list are far more LUAL pilots, far in excess of the ratio between the two carriers and with far more longevity. Far more UAL pilots were put on the bottom that CAL pilots.

Same for the top 1/4 of the list. Almost the same number of LCAL pilots in the top 1/4 as LUAL even though UAL was bigger by about 40%.