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Pilot Seniority 101 Part 1- The Sacred Cow
By admin | March 12, 2008
With all of this hubaloo surrounding the pilots and the Delta/Northwest merger, the issue of pilot seniority lists has become a sort of an enigma. According to Delta officials, the merger with Northwest will not be pursued until the pilots at both airlines have come to an agreement to merge seniority lists. But 
The five most important things to a pilot are “Seniority”,”Altitude”, “Airspeed”, “Jet Fuel”, and “Seniority”. This cannot be overstated. Everything in the airline pilot’s career is based off of seniority. In the case of the Delta and Northwest pilots, Pay, schedule, aircraft, seat (captain or first officer), and even non-rev benefits are all predicated upon seniority, and seniority is dependent upon Date of Hire (DOH) and nothing else. But don’t confuse seniority with experience, because they’re not necessarrily the same thing.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s assume you have pilot B. Johnson, 52 years old, who was hired at Delta on July 2, 1992. B. Johnson has over 20 years and 10,000 hours as a captain in a 727 at Braniff.
Exactly one day prior on July 1, 1992, A. Smith was also hired by Delta at the ripe old age of 23. A. Smith has spent a year as a flight instructor and has 500 hours in Cessna aircraft (Smith wouldn’t have made the requirements to be hired by Delta, but the drastic difference helps illustrate the example).
A. Smith has a DOH of July 1, 1992 and B. Johnson has a DOH of July 2, 1992. Period. This is now all that matters. That Johnson has 19 years of experience over Smith now means absolutely nothing. When bidding for a schedule, trying for a promotion, or even trying to fly stand-by, B. Johnson will always be forced to yield to A. Smith.
Years later, both A. Smith and B. Johnson decide to bid for an upgrade to captain which yields almost a doubling of pay. The bidding process begins with the pilot at the top of the seniority list and moves down. If #1 is not already a captain and wants to be, he automatically gets the bid. As the process works its way down the seniority list, it get’s to A. Smith with only one captain slot open. A. Smith becomes a captain, and B. Johnson remains a first officer at ~50% captain’s pay. It certainly doesn’t matter that B. Johnson has 20 years of experience to A. Smith’s complete lack. A. Smith has a higher seniority, so he becomes captain.
The implications of this type of system are deeper than its simplicity suggests. Here’s where it gets interesing. Suppose you have an airline of 5 pilots. Due to explosive growth (and I do mean ‘explosive), the airline needs to hire 100 pilots in 100 days. The first pilot hired will very shortly find himself in the top 6% of seniority. If you make the slightly simplified assumption that the top 50% of the list are captains, and the bottom 50% are FO’s, this pilot will be eligible for upgrade in only 12 days. Conversely, the last pilot hired will need to see a combination of 105 new pilots added or 53 retirements of pilots above him. This pilot is barely three months junior to the first pilot, but his promotion time has increased by almost ten-fold if the airline maintains this unlikely rate of growth. More likely, it will take another 5 years for this to happen, and assumming he makes $30k this pilot will miss out on at least $150k over 5 years simply because he was hired 3 months after the first pilot.
An example of an old seniority list based on Date of Hire
Topics: Pilot Seniority | Comments
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