I see QF is upgrading Airbus FOs at the moment to the left seat 737.
JB is 20 years the norm in QF anyway from first joining the payroll to left seat 737. ?
I guess longer waits for FOs at Virgin today will benefit the next generation of FOs who join in 10-15 years. Won’t need to wait too long as I assume all those FOs in the late 40s and 50s today need to retire after what will sadly be a reduced time in the left seat.
Qantas was pretty well always training FOs to be Captains. It doesn’t actually matter if you were Airbus or Boeing, especially if you’ve previously done time on the other brand. A number of the 380 FOs that I’ve kept in touch with have made the move to the 737, but that was a normal progression anyway.
Trying to guess timings though, is pretty well impossible. I always subscribed to the theory that you took any promotion you could get, as soon as you could. That meant though, that you’d be almost permanently ‘junior’. The only time I delayed at all, was a wait of only a couple of months, to get the 767 instead of the 747 Classic. I was fortunate to get a command in 7 years, but that is an almost unheard of timing, and was a consequence of the growth that happened when the company bought the 767.
The AVERAGE time in each of the three ranks will be about 10-12 years. So, on that basis a command on anything is about 20 years wait. But, numerous things affect that. The current contraction is terrible, but if things eventually go back to more or less normal, the top end has lost around 400 people, so for a while, there will quite an acceleration.
The left hand seat can sometimes be a poisoned chalice, so not everyone will be upset if they don’t get there.