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#1 Lufthansa Frankfurt, three years, and Hannah wrote the year four long haul view. This is year three, the transition year, when the long haul bids start landing and the short haul years show their value. For the new joiners who are counting.
Years one and two
Short haul on the A320 family from Frankfurt: Europe, the German domestic, the four sector days, the Club style service in the front cabin, the Lufthansa way learned on the aircraft where mistakes are small. The seniority list puts the new joiners on the European fleet and the bidding gives them what is left. Two years of it, and I understand now why the airline does it that way.
Year three
The long haul qualification courses come as the seniority allows and the fleet needs. My A350 and A340 courses came at 28 months. Then the bidding: the long haul trips are awarded in seniority order and a year three crew member holds the trips nobody above wants, which right now means some of the North America and the less popular Asia. Not Tokyo yet. Not Cape Town yet. But long haul, with the crew rest and the layover and the allowances.
What the seniority list actually does
It is a queue. Every year the people above you retire, go part time, transfer to Munich or leave, and you move up. The bids you lost in year three you win in year five. The Tokyo you cannot hold now you hold at year eight. The list is slow and it is fair and it rewards staying. The Gulf crew who join Lufthansa at 30 and start at the bottom find this the hardest part; the German new joiners at 22 find it normal.
The transition
The first long haul trip after two years of short haul is a shock: the length, the crew rest, the service that takes two hours instead of forty minutes, the layover in a city you have never seen. The short haul crew who did their two years properly are faster on the cart and better with the passengers than the crew who somehow skipped it. The transition is where the short haul years pay.
The money in year three
The long haul allowances arrive and the net moves up noticeably. The Tarifvertrag sets it and the UFO agreement is public: read the long haul allowance section and you will know your year three before you get there.
The part time option
The Lufthansa part time from 50 percent is the thing that shapes the list: a lot of the senior crew are part time, which means more of the senior trips are available than the headcount suggests. That is a Lufthansa specific effect on the seniority and it helps the mid juniors.
For new joiners
Do the short haul properly. Read the Tarifvertrag. Take the long haul courses when offered. Bid the trips nobody wants in year three and learn the long haul on them. And understand that the list is the career: slow, fair, and worth it if you stay.
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#2 Frankfurt, year four, and Niklas is one year behind me on exactly the same path. The part time effect on the senior trips is the thing new joiners do not know: the list looks longer than it is. Read the Tarifvertrag. He is right.
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#3 Munich, five years, and the transfer to Munich effect on the Frankfurt list is real: every Munich transfer moves Frankfurt up one. The list is a queue and the queue moves in ways you can read if you watch.
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#4 Ex Emirates, and the 'Gulf crew who join at 30 and start at the bottom' point is the one I would tell any Gulf crew considering Lufthansa. The list does not care about your Dubai years. It cares about your Frankfurt years.
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#5 SWISS Zurich, and our list is shorter so the year three long haul is more like year two, but the shape is identical: short haul first, courses when the seniority allows, the unpopular trips first, Tokyo later. The Lufthansa Group model.
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#6 Eurowings, and the reason I did not move to Lufthansa in year three was exactly the list: I would have been at the bottom of Niklas's queue at 30. He is right that it is fair. It is fair to the 22 year olds.
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#7 Hamburg, applying, and 'the list is the career' is the sentence that explains the Lufthansa choice. Slow and fair. I think I want that. Applying to Eurowings as well in case I am wrong.
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#8 Austrian Vienna, same shape, shorter list, and the Tarifvertrag being public is the thing every Lufthansa Group applicant should use. The numbers are in the document. The forum is the commentary.
