JB and AI.
Is the ‘career FO’ a thing? Do people exist that just want to be in the right seat and stay there? I assume some who don’t pass the upgrade course repeatedly just give up and stay sitting?
Yes, they are, and for a number of reasons.
If you look at QF, before CV-19, there were approximately equal numbers of SO, FO, and Captains. So, the AVERAGE career would be a third of the time in each of those positions. And if we say that the average age of people joining is 30, and retirement 63, then you’ve got 33 years of flying, with that mythical average person spending 11 years in each rank.
For many reasons, any promotion training almost always involved a change of aircraft type. So, for a 380 FO, he’d have to go to the 737 for his earliest command opportunity. But, there were various bases, and their popularity varied immensely too. The upshot, is that you’d probably have to change aircraft, and move your family to another city (or become a commuter, which has it’s own bag of worms). As a 30 year old just starting, moving around has few issues. But in your 40s or 50s it becomes extremely difficult. Kids are in high school. Wife has job. It gets very messy.
Taking this a bit further, when the 767 was retired, quite a few of its Captains gave up their 4 bars and took an FO slot on the 380 in preference to going to the 737 or even the 330.
Beyond that there’s the obvious case of people who have missed out on promotion training. QF gives a person two goes at such training, after which they are locked out forever. These people were mostly quite good FOs, but didn’t manage the mindset change that has to come with the change of seats.
QF also required pilots who wanted a promotion course to be recommended by the training training department. To that end, there were a number of sims that they had to do to get that recommendation. Quite a few fell over at that point, and so they were never in a position to even start the command training. There were lots of reasons for missing out at this stage, but one of the most common was “one man band syndrome”. Possibly good pilots, who were not managing a crew.
Another group that did exist (but not any more) were the SOs who were recruited at an older age. Some of these were ex flight engineers, whilst others managed to fall into the airline during one of the periods of growth and insufficient decent applicants. They’d run into the age/family life issues mentioned above, but even earlier.