Untangled
As an ex CX guy, I thought I'd add my tuppence worth. I was terminated 17 days before my 10th anniversary with the airline. My health started to give out 2 years before and after several failed attempts at returns to work, it wasn't happening. I understand CX's decision and have no objections to their reason.
Shortly after I joined CX from the military, 49 pilots were fired to scare the rest of us in to line. Having worked so hard to fly the aircraft of my dreams and one of the best airlines in the world, I didn't realise how much it had affected me. The fear of loss stayed with me for many years.
Around 5 years into my CX career, I regained my UK ATPL and it was at this point that I should have left. Flight deck chat was invariably about Ts and Cs and who had left to fly for whom. There was an excitement around the latter as if a fellow colleague had escaped from a prison camp.
As a based FO doing 3 HK trips a month, the commute was difficult at times and my sleep began to suffer. We gave up 5-4-3. I began having "micro days" where I'd sleep for 2 hours then be awake for 6.
I clung on, ignoring my health, and passed command assessment on my second attempt. The first was with a dinosaur BM who grilled me for 90 minutes on the obsolete Vol 4 - we'd moved on to FCOMs - with encouraging phrases like, "You've just killed 400 people." I had a chat with the fleet head of training who replied, "We really must find out what goes in in these assessments." We could debate the "training" system at length.
Finally, my health gave out and I left aviation.
Friends, for what it's worth, my opinion was and is that CX is gradually being turned into a local airline in preparation for 2047. There's no longer as much of a requirement for ex-pats as there used to be and the erosion of Ts & Cs will continue. At the risk of being branded a racist, the SE Asian mentality is not compatible with some other cultures. Yes, you can operate within it but HK is all about making money. Do not and do not think you can interfere with the process. From random firings through failing SOs' upgrades to illegal basing operations, the proof is there.
I'm in the process of returning to aviation but the journey is already around 28 months and difficult at times. Monetarily, I've "lost" over £1M in earnings but I don't give it a minute's thought. I sleep, I dream and still love that point where someone says "rotate" and we slip the surly bonds once more.
New pilots at the flying club will invariably engage me in a what-should-I-do conversation and my reply to each of them is the same: follow your dreams. If you want to fly short or long haul, it's up to you. I had always wanted to fly 747s and I did it: tick VG.
I'm now at several crossroads at the same time in my life and feel rather like Tom Hank's Fed-Ex guy at the end of the film. My only regret is that I didn't leave CX sooner.