410, the letter from your old Training Captain illustrates a point that some might miss – that the good times in this industry have come and gone within one pilot’s working life. I’m assuming your mate is 60, so he was born around 1943, which would have had him starting in the industry around 1961, (as he stated) getting his first airline job in ’65, which would have had him as a senior captain in ’89, but only 46 years old. I’m assuming he didn’t go back to work for AN after 89, so he, like the overwhelming majority of the pilots of his age and experience, would have seen the last fourteen years out with one of the overseas airlines.
So really, the good old days really didn’t last more than twenty years… except for the heroic ‘Few’ in AN who managed to squeeze another twelve years out of it, and the ones in QF Domestic who continue to do so, but at what cost to the rest of their colleagues within the industry, particularly the younger ones, who they so effectively sold down the river for their own short term gain.
I hope everyone bemoaning the current state of the industry is beginning to see the vital part those heroes played in screwing the careers of everyone else. And don’t waffle on about how it was inevitable – there were faint hearts within the ranks on every occasion Dick Holt organised industrial action back in the 60’s and 70’s, but none of them scabbed. The faint hearts and opportunists in 89 did, and if they hadn’t, the companies and the pilots’ elected union representatives would have come a compromise agreement, as they’d always done before, with neither side winning nor losing outright.
It could have been all so different, ands we could still have had what amounted to the Guild people are now talking about, except for the despicable actions of the ‘heroes’.