As far as the time-to-upgrade is concerned: if I were a new-hire today, I would "plan" for 4-5 years as an F/O. It obviously may turn out to be less than this amount of time...and if so, great. But the general belief is that the upgrade time will lengthen (as it has over the last 18 months). Retirements and additional airframes to the overall fleet (both of which are fluid factors here at NJA) will play important roles.
One other important thing to keep in mind, too, is that if the TA passes, I would expect to see a number of current captains transitioning to other, more junior fleets in order to gain relative seniority for schedule and vacation bidding purposes. As many know, the TA, while improving F/O pay dramtically, also eliminates the higher pay for most of the larger aircraft (ie, the "aircraft class" pay structure). Those fleets where the MTOW is less than 40,000 LBS (90+% of our planes maybe?) will all pay the same -- and some of the current captains in these fleets will probably consider bidding to a smaller aircraft (improving their relative seniority) since the pay will be the same. There may come a point where the Sovereign, X, Hawker and G200 fleets become the junior captain equipment (rather than the 560, XL and 400XP).
On the flip-side, those transitioning captains will also be "vacating" a captain seat in their original fleets...so over time, in theory anyway, it may not have that big of an impact long-term if the company stays on top of keeping the fleets sufficently staffed. But you can expect, in the short-run, to see a lot of the initial captain bids go to existing captains.
The F/Os may not be too happy about this, but at least the F/O wage in the TA is livable.
