Unless you think the airline can just eat the cost of raises, I'm not so sure it's a simple case of class warfare. Airlines operate on very thin margins, so any increase in costs would have to lead to increased prices for customers.

Hard to say, upgrade means going to a junior base which are almost universally high COL areas and you'd need to either move there or rent a crash pad for several months to several years until you can go back.

In my case, I'm lucky enough to have 0 ex-wives and no kids to put through college so I'm in a comfortable position money wise. It would take a pretty big chunk of money for me to take the hastle to upgrade until I could hold my base.

The senior first officers are noting QoL issues as the major reason they are not choosing to be junior captains. If a 40% increase in salary isn't enough to get people to make the jump, maybe the solution is to change the quality of life for junior captains.

It might also be cheaper for the airline to make the cutoff more flexible in a way that is acceptable to the pilots' union.

That clearly didn't work. A 40 percent increase is plenty, but it seems people don't want their jobs to dictate their personal lives. Which is fair, I guess.

They need to change the expectations tha t come with the junior captain's seat. Or force senior captains to be a bit more lenient, too.

The alternative is having no captains anymore, soon.