Pinnacle Outlook

[Looking4Traffic]

5000 total and with another regional.

Live in Minneapolis. I think that I might put up with the pain and suffering if I could sleep half the month at home and not commute. Is MSP considered a low seniority base for Captains? If Pinnacle hired street captains and I was able to come on that way, how long would it take before I could hold MSP?

 

[PeanuckleCRJ]

Both DTW and MSP have been going very junior recently. I'm personally bidding DTW first, for my own reasons. If you jump ship to Peanuckle..it's your own risk. You might get screwed and get displaced down the road..but you're guaranteeing yourself at least a good 3 years or more of reserve.


In my new hire class it was about 50/50 g-stringers to high time people. No freaking way I would have ever paid to be right seat on a 1900.... and that's all I'm going to say about it on a public forum.

 

[Dirty Sanchez]

MSP and DTW alternate for the more junior base. You could probably get either.The last vacancy, 4-11, had 17 DTW and 9 MSP captains. 11 of these were switching bases and not upgrading. Lowest seniority getting DTW was 957 and 870 for MSP. We currently have 1029 pilots...

 

[Lear70]

That doesn't include the secondaries we'll see in two days. The final should have at least half a dozen more CA's.

 

[FO 4 Life]

I was nosy today so I called HR about street captains. No plans to do it. She said they are hiring captain qualified (TT) right now so they should be able to cover vacancies if not enough current pilots bid CA.

 

[Looking4Traffic]

So, just to make sure that I understand . . .

No street captains currently being hired but time to upgrade would be short because there aren't enough qualified guys bidding to the left seat.

Peanuckle -- what did you mean about getting "displaced" down the road? Are you talking about getting displaced out of the seat? How would that happen?

Thanks for the info.

 

[Lear70]

What Peanuckle is probably referring to is either our tendency to change staffing models like sports socks or the likely whipsaw tactic of taking airplanes and giving them to someone else down the road as a "scare tactic".

If either happens, the contract allows for the company to displace in junior seniority order back to the right seat, and if need be furlough F/O's. They did the displacement thing back in Jan - Mar of 2003 and it was a complete cluster; they cancelled 25% of every flight the first week, and didn't have a single good on-time performance day until the last month before we were reinstated.

Worse, if you stay out of the seat for 90 days, you lose your ability to automatically get it back when a vacancy comes up, which basically means you're stuck as an F/O until your seniority can hold it. It's a nasty reality that you run the risk of coming here (or anywhere else) where you bypass a lot of people on the seniority list because they don't have the time.