Originally Posted by
ben38uk
In BA, Date of Joining is key. Don't get hung up on waiting for a particular fleet as over your remaining career, your seniority number is everything.
Your lifestyle will depend on relative seniority within the fleet. I believe you get full fleet change bidding rights after the first five years.
Hope this helps
Seniority is important, but I'm not sure I agree with this any more. Recruitment onto LH and SH fleets is almost on a par at the moment. I would question the benefit of taking SH over LH while that is the case and, moreover, projects to be the case for some time yet - especially when the tradeoff is 5 years of your life for what will invariably only be a fractional increase in seniority.
Also bear in mind that some of the people posting here have never experienced BA short haul in its current form, especially when junior (full EASA, JSS optimised, bi-monthly reserve, etc) so have no idea what they're recommending, or how appalling it really is. The simple fact is that the way BA rosters are now engineered, your roster is likely to be pretty awful wherever you start. Yes,
seniority may increase marginally quicker on short haul than it would on long haul, but if you're still spending over double the time in uniform, does that seniority really equate to a better lifestyle?