Originally Posted by
Jumbo2
... Some choose to join a stable legacy career airline with a seniority system ...
Originally Posted by
macdo
The first casualty if you lose the Seniority system will be your sense of any job security, for all of your career.
Beware of what you wish for...
TWA, Eastern Airlines, Pan Am, Swissair, SABENA. All 'legacy career airlines'. All with seniority systems. How was job security with them?
Earnest Gann has been mentioned. He got out of the airline industry when he saw,
as a senior pilot in his airline how unfair the system was on people, not on their own choices or decisions but entirely on the decisions of those in management or the quirks of business at the time.
If you are determined to have a seniority system then you
must accept that you go to the very bottom of the pile, no matter what experience you have or what post you hold if through some quirk that you have no control over whatsoever, for example a major international financial crash, major terrorist incidents, a world-wide pandemic, etc. That means a training captain with 15,000 hrs+ and 25 years in that airline (for example)
has to become a junior first officer. That is just stupid. For a start, a waste of talent and experience. And will he get a job as a junior f/o? Or will he be considered potentially too much of a CRM risk with junior captains?
Beware of what you wish for...