BRA said:
Eagle hired 500+ pilots in 1998 and 500+ pilots in 1999.
If you were hired in October 1999 or later at American Eagle, you have never had the chance to upgrade...If you were hired between October 1998 and August 1999 you were upgraded and then displaced after the 9/11 reductions. If you were hired prior to September 1998 at American Eagle, you had the opportunity to upgrade between 14-24 months after your DOH and you were never displaced out of your Captains seat (unless they closed your base and you didn't want to move)...what a difference a year makes.
Said another way, if you were hired in 1998 (beg-mid) at Eagle you have spent the last 6-7 years in the left seat...if you were hired in 1999(mid-end) at Eagle, you have spent the last 6-7 years in the right seat.
Everybody who has been around awhile (not too many on this board) will tell you not to chase the upgrade..imagine yourself in November 1999 and your buddy tells you that "Eagle has 14 month upgrades!"
Granted, 9/11 changed a lot, but by the time 9/11 came around the upgrade had already gone up to 24 months and was "rising" every month because it would take 2 months to go through a months worth of pilots. I was figuring that I would upgrade at about 28 months by the time my number came up.
The mistake that I and others make is that they look at how long people presently at the company have taken to upgrade. The mistake is that it doesn't matter how long you've been at a company, it matters how many people will be senior to you in relation to there expansion/attrition/retirements.
The people that get the quick upgrades are the people that get on in the begginning of a hiring boom.
I learned my lesson...I left Eagle, heard about a little airline that was about to go through a huge expansion hired on and was upgraded in 5 months...I would say it would have been 12-13 months had there not been a ton of FO's senior to me who did not have the time requirements. Right now we have had some reductions and pilots with 6 months less seniority than me are getting dumped back down to FO. These are probably the guys that heard on flightinfo that they would upgrade in 6 months then applied.
If I had to do it again and I was insistent on chasing the upgrade I would stay away from places that have been going through a mega hiring boom (skywest???) and try to look for somewhere that is about to go through a rapid expansion/recovery (skywest???, Frontier?, Eagle-once AA recalls it will again be a descent place to be) but haven't been hiring very many pilots lately. Especially nowadays, with fee-for-departure contracts changing hands more frequently than most pilots change underware....this is a very complicated/difficult thing to do.
sooo....which is why those who have seen ups and downs and ups of this industry recommend that you work somewhere that you want to work because of there domiciles (more than one that you could be happy with)...or they treat people right...or they have good flight benefits...or they only do day trips...or whatever floats your boat...and not try to chase the upgrade because chances are you will be disappointed.
Later
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