Letter from Greg Hughes (Service Delivery Mgr) to HKAOA
Dear Greg,
Just read your April 10th letter to the HKAOA Chairman. You rabbit on and on about the need for “both parties” to be open to concessions, that there has to be “give and take” from both sides (and we know that in your mind, that ONLY means pilot concessions). Let me help clarify a few things for you. The pilots are done “giving”. That is all you and your ilk have expected from the early 1990’s.
Obviously, you and your management cohorts are still living in the 1990’s. You still seem to believe that you have the upper hand. Well, unless you have figured out a way to operate an airline without pilots, you no longer have the upper hand. We do.
The pilots of the airline have concluded, almost to a person that this job is no longer worth staying for. Nearly every flight I operate has crew that are either: a) applying for a new job, b) have already interviewed for a new job, c) are awaiting a course date for their new job, d) have already given notice for their new job, or e) retiring early as they can’t stand any longer their old job.
You and your kind have pushed your cart just that one inch too far over the line, and the result is that you have enabled most of us to clear away any cobwebs of doubt we may have had as to whether or not we needed to seek employment elsewhere. In case you haven't noticed, most of the worlds airlines are short of pilots, and becoming more so every day. We have plenty of options.
Every time you or AT or RH make any utterances that contradict our well reasoned and insistent improvement to pay, housing, staff travel, medical, retirement etc, you simply ensure that another 100 or so pilots sit up and say to themselves “ I’m leaving”.
So you go ahead and keep pretending that you can drive the pilots of this airline deeper into penury. You can then move onto your next “service delivery” item, which will be figuring out how the aircraft are going to move from A to B without the very people who you are striving so hard to screw over. Good luck with that, please let us know how that turns out.