What 'command minimums' really mean
Published upgrade minimums — commonly 3,000–5,000 total hours with 1,500–2,500 on type — are entry tickets, not promises. The real gates are seniority position, the airline's growth rate, and your training file. A fast-growing LCC can put you in the left seat in four years; a stagnant legacy list can take fifteen. When pilots choose airlines purely on FO salary, this is the variable they undervalue most.
The upgrade course, demystified
Expect a command ground school, a sim phase where the failures stop being handling exercises and start being judgement scenarios (diversion decisions, fuel dilemmas, unserviceable-aircraft calls), then line training under a training captain and a final line check. The assessed shift is from flying the aircraft to owning the operation — the paperwork, the cabin crew, the ground delay, the passenger issue. Sim work is rarely what fails candidates; decision-making and crew leadership are.
Building a command file from day one
Training captains write reports on every sim and line check, and those reports are reread when the upgrade board sits. From your first month as an FO: volunteer the radio work in busy airspace, brief like you mean it, make and verbalise decisions in the cruise ("if this weather holds I'd take the southern alternate — here's why"), and treat every check as a command audition, because it is. Captains notice FOs who think one seat to the left; so do their reports.
When to move airlines for the left seat
Sometimes the fastest command is at another carrier — turboprop and regional commands build genuine decision-making credit, and some pilots leapfrog via a smaller operator's left seat back to a major. The trade-offs are seniority resets and bond repayments, so do the arithmetic over ten years, not two. A command at 30 on a Q400 followed by a major's right seat often beats a decade of widebody FO cruise relief — both in pay and in how interview panels read you.