Originally Posted by
Denti
Well, yes, i have done both. And for internal upgrades candidates, the current situation simply means that the company prefers to keep internal upgrade numbers artificially low in favor of direct entry captains. And that has been indeed confirmed by training, simply because the training department likes that DECs do not use up that much of its capacity. In effect, internal candidates, even those with prior command experience on airbus, have to stay back for external captains, and that is quite a bit to swallow.
But the bigger issue is, it is not an objective system, it is completely and utterly subjective. I would argue that most would not have any issue at all with a fair and objective system. But that does not exist in easyJet.
Sorry Denti but have you personally done both? Did you do an internal upgrade in eJ, leave the company and then join again as a DEC? Maybe if you’re a training Captain you’ve trained both, but if that were the case then you’d not be arguing the point you currently are I don’t think.
You’ve honestly no idea what the company prefers, without being on the board how could you? I’ve wanted to join eJ for over 11 years and they’ve only hired non rated for last couple. So where you get the idea the company likes anything other than upgrading internally I don’t know. The last few years where the likes of BA (and even Air France) have probably hoovered up plenty of FO’s, eJ have hired DEC (and DEP) because they needed to not because they wanted to IMO. Personally I think companies prefer to do that regardless of training capacity as they’d see it as they can still mould the candidate into the type of Captain they want. Not to mention they pay them less than a DEC to begin with.
The latter part of your comment is probably true. It was like that at my last company. Some people on my command course came from small bases and got signed off to do the upgrade because they simply knew the base Captain really well. Others like myself, had to jump through all the hoops to achieve the same.
My advice would be to remember that you’ve no god given right to expect you’re next for the LHS just because you meet the requirements. Long haul FO’s probably wait 10 or more years with the minimum requirements before even having a sniff at upgrading. (FWIW I sat in the BA hold pool for 18 months while BA hired white tails and then reopened recruitment to allow 500 hr Airbus newbies in ahead of us swimmers - also a bitter pill to swallow, but that’s the way it goes I’m afraid).