Upon Joining in 2013:
- Money was quite good considerating the real commuting contract.(possible to go home in the 3 weeks on)
July 2013 Cpt LH Basic money was 22.000 TL divided by 2,56 was 8.500 € + Bonus every 3 months and 80 hrs (10 hrs above 70 hrs contract) gave an average of 10.500 € up to 11.000 € after taxes.
- Extra Appartment money was 2.000 TL (780$) or accommodation in great Titanic hotel payed by Thy .
- Flight time /Duty time was quite good. It allowed the Airline to make you fly up to 90 hours and at the same time have decent rest times to go home in between your 3 weeks on / 1 week off (actually 9 days off)
- Rest time were excluded from the Off days which meant that you could have sometimes more than 9 days !
- We had reserve day with require to call the day before at 5PM to know if there was a duty the next day . Great for expat flying to home in between duties as they could some times stay one more day at home! Sometimes 3 nights home in the On period!!
- 4 pilots for duties like Kabul (go and back) or Pvg (2 days layover) Fru Ist followed by 48 hours rest
- Some nice 2 days layover in nice hotels in Jakarta, Capetown always followed by 48 hrs rest time etc…
- Maximum 6 days duty in a row and NO double duty on the same day.
Well …Foreign Pilots rushed to Turkish Airlines. We were more than 1.000 !
Then there was the very terrible 2016 year with the « Coup « and terrorist attacks in Turkey and Istanbul airport.
All employee understood the hard situation of the Country and Turkish Airlines, expressing their good will, accepting lower salaries until situation stabilizes.
Unfortunately for us (see below) , great CEO Temel Kotil left (was requested to leave?) and a new Management put in place , ready to smash all employee working conditions.
In 2017 (4 years later):
- July 2017 Cpt LH Basic Money was 32.200 TL divided by 4,16 is 7.700 € +Bonus every 3 months and NO overtime (you fly 69Hrs59 min and they **** up your roster if you have overtime). Average is below 9.000 € all included on a 3 months basis.
You are payed on the 8th. Curiously exchange rate is always decreasing the days before. It is very frustrating.Just check if you don’t believe me.
Salary is adjusted every 6 months but below the official inflation.
Every month salary is going down as they pay all employee in TL while they are making huge money in Usd or €.
In the same time all your costs are based on Usd/€. Even for Turkish people as they import everything.Id 90 tickets and even training bonds or Flight academy for younger pilots is due in €/Usd. So their amount due is never going down !!
- Extra Appartment money is still at 2.000 TL (became 400 €) or Hyatt Hotel 5 stars but very bad location. We,expats, got the order to move to another hotel in 1 email sent 30/12/16 for 1/1/17 without any consideration of what we like and where we feel good. After enquiry with hotel managers, Thy moved foreign pilots from Titanic to Hyatt for a 10 TL difference a night (2 €). Yes!!
In this 4,5 years of time , renting an appartment became also much more expensive
- They implemented an insane new Flight Time /Duty time (except for 777 pilots, the winners) which allows them to force you destroying your health
Example: With 3 pilots,You can go now upto 17 hrs + 3 hrs (extension you are expected to accept) equal 20 hrs of duty !!!. So the Pvg Fru Ist becomes possible with 3 pilots ! and forget the 48 hrs min rest times as you spend only 24 hrs in PVG (instead of 48 hrs in PV. SO ….no jet lag considered in FTDT. So ….minimum rest
Same for Kabul (difficult and sensible place ) become with 3 pilots with a mandatory resting inflight patterns of 1H30 each. Stupid and dangerous as all pilots are dead tired upon landing in Istanbul after 15 hrs duty. Forget the 48 hours rest times.
Back from 11 hrs Cape Town at 5am loc time you have a Stby to fly again the same night
Back from 7 hrs Nairobi flight at 4am loc, you get a Stby the same evening from 10pm!!!
- After each flight you become Home Stby so your are stuck in Istanbul. Forget to go home, it is impossible. You belong to the Airline and they can do what they want with you. You are just nothing than a register number having his Turkish Phone mandatory open even in your rest times . You get notifications from Planning department that are considered as accepted as soon as you read it
- Of course, you can never make a request for a flight. Flight distribution is a secret. Hold by HR only . Even Flight Operations have nothing to say to HR .
But I , personally,have never been to Havana, Mauritius, Seychelles or Bogota, more than 2 years without Usa flights.
Kabul , Pakistan and Middle East were my usual flights.
- Cutting money from your salary is probably the fastest reaction they have. Everything is a reason to cut your money.
As you are permanently in stby, if you don’t answer 2 times your phone, you get cuts. Sick abroad? No way you are cut. Then sometimes you may get the money back if writing to your « delegated » assistant fleet manager who ,now, even doesn’t reply any more (because he is also demotivated and doesn’t get any "Office time" any more to reply to his pilots)
- Of course when you get annual leave , they make you fly the 70 hrs due in 2 weeks. It shows there is no good will from them to improve your expat schedule.
- Regularly, we received Text messages from Thy: « Dear esteemed (!!!!!) Captains, we are short of pilots…please accept requests from relevants units… » and at the same time they make them go away from Thy. Hard to understand isn’t it?
- 90% of Long Haul flights are night flights. Most of ER Departures are around 2 AM and arrivals around 5 AM. This very tiring and totally different from other Majors were one of the flight is a day flight. But Thy don’t take into consideration night duties. Only Jet lag if more than 48 hours. Then you are acclimatized …and you get 2 , 3 or 4 local nights…..that they can now, with new FTDT ,put in your regular off days! Well , the Job is exhausting.
- 9 days duty in a row, double duty in the same day. Example you can fly 9 times early or night flight in a row waking up at 3 am . No problem
- The 9 days off became actually 7 days as your tight schedules make it impossible to go home on the 21 st day and you get a duty on the 1 st day around 1 am …. So you have to travel early in your last day off….to have the minimum "12 hrs at Istanbul before a flight rule" they implemented.
- Hotel quality and locations changed drastically . eg: Sanghri La in downtown Jakarta became airport hotel. Southern sun waterfront hotel in Cape town became low class Protea hotel in an unsafe place. Radisson Blue in downtown Manhattan became Long Island Marriott at 1hr from Manhattan then low class Row Hotel in Manhattan.
As hotel locations are unsafe, we got a note that crews are not supposed to walk out of hotels !
Crash in Kathmandou is already forgotten. And this is the REAL problem.
They talk about Flight Safety every day but do not respect their pilots and their real responsibilities .
Atmosphère in the working environment became very bad.
2018:
New Airport located 1H30 from Istanbul will open on 29th October.
There is no train, no highway, no hotels right now.
While they expect thousands of employee will move there.
Nothing seems to be prepared. No message , no explanation . Nothing
It will be a huge mess as they want to transfer all Thy operations in 2 days
The main issue for management is to kill the new Official Union Hava-Sen that collected more than 4.000 applications in a few weeks.
Mainly Pilots but also a few cabin crew members .
The only way they found is to fire 2 Captains and 5 cabin crew to spread terror.
While, in the mean time ,Thy made huge profits
All this is true according to my personal experience on A 330/340
It ’s became a Hell.
And I don’t talk about 737 and 320 fleets where the new FTDT is worse and definitely killing them .