Vacancy bid?
 

Any ideas when we might see a new vacancy bid?

In June and one a month after that.

Cool! Thank you!

As others have said next month. I'm sure they want to evaluate where the displacements go before they drop a bid as those number will have some effect on staffing levels.

SSC rep on the UALpilot forum mentioned a lot of bids coming from June on due to all the new aircraft we're receiving before summer '17 flying.

Howard's weekly fireside chat yesterday said the same thing.

Thank you, everyone 👍

I've heard approximately 150, 777 Capt bids...The training center is furiously training new 777 instructors at the moment. So there might be some truth to it.

Where there is smoke there is fire. 14 777-300ERs in a six month period is a pretty aggressive delivery schedule on the widebody side of the airline.

Beautiful !!!

That seems very aggressive. Can Boeing even deliver on that schedule?

2 per month to UA?

Yup, Boeing builds 7 to 8 777s per month. In the case of these orders, UAL grabbed production slots of aircraft that KLM/AF cancelled which is why they were available at short notice.

Cool. I hope we have the crews for them and the routes ready to rock and roll. That is some seriously good growth in a seriously awesome fleet type. Good trips, great QoL, and a decent paycheck for those crews. I hope we aren't putting them up for static display all around the system and keeping our crews in hibernation in IAH.

We'll see the bids to staff them starting in June. According to the fleet planners the primary use initially will be up-gauging existing EWR markets and then the 777-200s will backfill other markets. It's not as rosy as it could first appear because UA also brought 5 787s orders forward. Combined it's enough airframes to permit the earlier than planned retirements of the 747s so the net result is only mild growth.

2016: Dec x1
2017: Jan x2, Feb x2, Mar x3, Apr x2

30 percent increase of pilot roster for the 777 at ORD
and that will be mostly filled by the B744 displaced pilots

According to the snapshot many of them are leaving for 787 CA/FO. Will be interesting to see where the rest go.

5 out of 15 bumps but the fleet is also growing.

Are you expecting to see open FOs slots on the 777 at ORD in the next upcoming bid next week or so

If I were to guess, yes I do expect to see ORD 777 FO vacancies. But I have zero insight into future staffing plans.

I'm just going off of what's written in the mid-May Crew Resources Update and the planned delivery schedule. The Crew Resources Update indicates the greatest staffing demands will be in SFO and ORD.

Since they're delivering ~2 777s per month starting in December, I'd expect training to temporarily overstaff the 777 so that there are adequate crews to fly all of the new metal. I don't know how fast new crews can be trained but staffing 2 new aircraft a month sounds like a bit more than they can handle in the training pipeline.

Maybe that explains the over staffing of IAH 777. they have the crews trained and ready to go. Likely they'll just build those trips out of IAH and DH crews to ORD and SFO.

I wasn't aware that the IAH 777 is overstaffed. Anecotally, it sounds like almost everything's overstaffed in IAH. Closing the training center there isn't going to help.

They can do that (overstaff the IAH 777) for a while but it's not efficient use of crews. Hopefully the number of IAH 777 pilots declines to match flying out of IAH before the 777 training backlog is eliminated. Once they've got rid of the training backlog (after all 777s are delivered), if there's still a large surplus at IAH, they can (and probably will) do a displacement bid.

Again, I don't have any insight on United's schedule or manning issues so my opinion isn't the most informed on this matter.

That's one theory......the other theory (I have not heard this at all) the 777 will build up flying in IAH to all the formere 787 destinations. I see zero reason to even have a 787 base in IAH and wouldn't be shocked if they closed it or atleast never grew it again.

The May crew resource said there would be CA vacancies in IAH to match the FO over staffing. I assume this means that as an FO leaves they will not be backfilled. They will let the IAH 787 die on the vine and move all frames to to SFO/LAX.

Just my theory....