FOR THOSE CONSIDERING JOINING AS A SO AT CX:
Posted by NC back in Mar 18. Still pretty accurate today:
I have started this thread simply to give what is likely to be a more accurate guide to upgrading to First Officer and then Captain at CX.
The first thing to watch out for – being told what the “current” time to upgrade/command is. That only applies to those that joined 4 or 11 years ago. Currently, those being upgraded to First Officer joined 3- 4 years ago. Those on Command course joined around 11 years ago.
We have recruited just under 2,000 pilots in the last 11 years and we have only exceeded 100 command courses/year on one occasion so far. We have recruited 700 in the last three years.
We have over 500 Second Officers now and by years end we expect to have almost 800 with only 10 SOs to be upgraded to FO this year. (Due to new Rostering policies they now need a lot more SOs and a lot fewer FOs)
I’ve used actual figures from 2011-2017 inclusive and used CX projections for 2018.
Based on that, a new joiner with DOJ 31/12/18 would upgrade to FO 6.6 years and to Captain in around 30.3 years. Now that is using an average rate for a, presumably, growing airline. I say presumably as we have actually remained the same size for the last three years.
If I ‘assume’ we will grow again at the same rate we did for the previous two decades then time to FO reduces to just over five years and time to command reduces to 17 years. My assumption of growth rate is OPTIMISTIC given the management plan for 2018-20 and the current industrial impasse in regards to the training ban. In other words – it will probably be longer than 5/17 years.
So you may be told upgrade to FO is 3 years and command time is 10.5 years – which it WAS for those that joined in 2007 and 2014. If you are planning on a career here – plan on 5-6 years as an SO. Plan on 17+ years till command(regardless of whether you join as an FO or SO)
(By the way – top increment on SO scale is reached after three years service. For a FirstOfficer it is after about 13 years. )