Seniority in and of itself is a simple concept that greatly complicates the personal and professional life of an airline pilot. Unlike longevity, which is a fixed number, seniority is a relative number.
Longevity is the amount of time you have been employed by an airline—two years, five years, 10 years, etc. Longevity is tied directly to pay and certain benefits such as length of vacation periods. If you are a new-hire pilot, you are in your first year of longevity and are therefore on year one pay (according to the pay scale typically found in the pilot contract or working agreement). In year two of longevity, your pay typically goes up and generally continues doing so annually until a stated year of longevity is reached—typically in year 10 or 12, where pay advances are often capped.
Vacation is similarly tied to longevity, where, for example, years one to three are provided one week of vacation, years four to six are two weeks, and so on. If you leave an airline for another one (say, from a regional operator to a mainline carrier), your longevity will start over. So, if you fly at Skywest for five years, then get hired at United, you will leave Skywest on five-year longevity, and arrive at United on year one of longevity.
Yes, your longevity and seniority starts over.
Seniority on the other hand represents the relationship of your longevity to every other pilot’s longevity at your carrier. In this way it is relative—and your status as “senior” or “junior” is a function of those around you—in your airline, base, fleet, seat, and status.
Pilots speak of bases and fleets as being junior or senior, or being “senior enough” to hold an upgrade to captain or “not senior enough” to get off reserve (status). Thus, seniority equates to less desirable or more desirable career options and control depending where you fall along that continuum.
Let’s take a deeper look and start with system (airline) seniority.
Each pilot at a given airline has an employee number that is attached to not only each employment year’s increasing longevity but with a seniority number that typically increases each year as well—as long as pilots at the top of the list are leaving or retiring, and the company is hiring and adding pilots to the bottom. There is a No. 1 pilot on property—and they are the most senior pilot. There is also the most junior pilot on property who was the last one hired at that airline.
If you are the last pilot hired at an airline for a decade, you will still be the most junior pilot on property even though you have 10 years of longevity. Conversely, you could get hired at an airline with high turnover and upgrade to captain in year two and by the end of year three are the most senior pilot on property.
Airlines with more than one base or domicile will invariably have pilots characterized as junior and others as senior—usually predicated on overall desirability such as ease of commute, quality of flying, fleet types, seniority movement (how quickly it goes up), cost of living, etc.
For example, Newark, New Jersey, for many United pilots is not desirable and is thus classified as a junior base. There are plenty of senior pilots based there, but for a myriad of reasons, it experiences a high turnover rate. Therefore, new-hire pilots at United can often expect to be based there first before accruing the seniority to hold another base, such as Denver, which is considered a senior base.
Furthermore, once at a base, your relative seniority will determine which aircraft you can fly (at an airline with more than one fleet type). Again, using United as an example, you might be senior enough to hold Denver as a base but not senior enough to hold flying on the Boeing 777 or 787. So, you might choose to be based in Denver but have to fly the B-737 for a while until your seniority sufficiently increases and then bid over to another fleet.
Conversely, in Newark you could hold B-777 flying because the base itself is less desirable, and you have the seniority in that particular base to hold it.
Now we get to seat seniority—captain and first officers—and there are two parts to it. The first is how senior are you among those pilots in your base, in your seat (left or right/captain or first officer)? The more senior, the more control you have over bidding for desirable flying—later day one show times, earlier last day finish times, overnight locations, avoiding red-eye flying, and so forth. The second is whether you are senior enough to hold a captain bid—and if so, where and in what fleet?
Let’s say you’re a Delta Airbus 350 first officer in Atlanta, which is also where you live. But you can hold an upgrade (captain) on the B-737 in Detroit. Do you want to leave the A350 and commute in exchange for being a guppy captain? Alternatively, you could wait until you have enough seniority to upgrade into the B-717 or B-737 in Atlanta in a couple of years, or simply enjoy being a widebody first officer for years to come. Pilots make these work-life choices all the time.
Your seniority will also determine your monthly awarded flight schedule and whether you are a lineholder (with a regular, known in advance schedule), or a reserve, where all you have are days of availability periods and are on call for the airline. The more senior you are, the more control you can exert over your schedule and general quality of work-life balance.
Days on, days off, vacation days, everything is awarded in seniority order—except furlough and the laying off of pilots. In this awful case, reverse seniority is used in the event your airline is struggling financially, downsizing, or going out of business. The most junior pilots in this case are let go first.
Lastly, if you commute to work (as discussed in the May’s Part 1 article), guess what? Seniority matters. Standbys are cleared to seats in the cabin in company seniority order, and the same thing goes for being awarded the flight deck jumpseat.
Add this to your career planning, and we will see you next month for another installment of airline pilot career planning tips. You can also read about this and everything else you need to know for understanding and managing your airline pilot career in our book The Airline Transition Manual, available now at www.airlinetransition.org.
This article was written by Richard Swindell, Andrew Ross, and Jolanda Witvliet.
If you would like more recommendations and a complete explanation on how the airline pilot profession works and how you can best manage it, pick up your physical or e-book copy of The Airline Transition Manual at www.airlinetransition.org.
