Originally Posted by
Goat Whisperer
I have to speak against the assertion that ATR pilots will be there for 5-10 years. That's utter nonsense.
This is my first post on PPRune in years, but the stupidity of this comment truly made my blood boil.
I'm just about to graduate to 7th year ATR captain and guess what.. STILL STUCK HERE!!!! Likely won't get to leave till 2019. I've jumped all the hoops, did all the right things, passed all the retarded interviews and sim checks years ago and all we've received as a reward are lies and underhanded delay tactics from a management team who are nothing more than tricksters.
The ATR fleet is a prison and it truly sucks being a second class citizen at Virgin Australia.
5 years on the ATR is a very "uptimistic" estimate. The whole fleet is under a 10% cap. That means 10 years!!! That's the reality. The company loves to crap on and lie to your face and say they'll let more than 10% go, but its all just lies to stop people from resigning. It has never happened and there's no reason to believe it ever will.
Now they've decided to put external hires and cadets ahead of even those ATR crew who have been offered positions on the 737 6 months ago, but were never given a start date and are still stuck on the leper fleet.
The company has hired a total of 2 new pilots for the ATR in the last 6 months, but I don't know of a single captain who has less than 1000 hours of leave accrued because the company has not approved leave in 4 F@ck!ng years!!!!
A few facts about the ATR.
- A new FO WILL BE STUCK on the ATR for at least 5-10 years earning less than the national average wage until a command opportunity comes up.
- A command might become available in under 5 years if they're lucky, but I've never heard of anyone getting it in less than 4 to date. If the industry slows down, commands will be non existent.
- If you do want to escape the ATR you have to do a full interview process the same as any external applicant. That now includes going to the Fokker 100 even tho the company has promised that would never happen. More lies.
- Being an ATR pilot means you cannot apply for jobs at Tiger (you are considered an internal applicant and the answer is NO).
- The rosters are absolute rubbish. Most duty's are around 10 hours long, but you're lucky to do 3 to 4 hours flying during the duty. All you do is sit at the airport fighting sleep. To give you an idea my roster recently had a 4 day block, which totals 41 duty hours. It's not a one off!!
- We are not protected by CAO48 because of the exemption. This means we are regularly rostered duties of 11:30.
- We are not protected by Virgins FRMS rules because we are under the Skywest EBA.
- I could go on all day because this is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even touched on the cluster f@c$ that is the Brisbane base closure and the way crew were repeatedly lied to and mislead there.