Hello!
Originally Posted by
His dudeness
>>You must be working for a very bad company.
He is. Or maybe was. But he stayed there for quite a few years. The company was TU (went from IIRC 9 to 2 A/C) recently and has now been taken over by another operator.
It's not so easy to find a universal definition of "good" or "bad" with respect to a bizjet employer. Impossible even. I am convinced that the company under whose AOC (*) I - and Mr. Dudeness before me, were flying for the past 11 years was indeed an above average one. At least compared to the ones I flew for before, and what I see going on around me, and what I hear from guys in crew rooms. The company lasted for over 65 years in a very difficult market and, at least to my knowledge, never had a major accident or incident. So they did not everything wrong. They had real good in-house maintenace, an excellent operations department for some years (Mr. Dudeness missed that) and - best of all - we only had to fly for the aircraft owners and a handful of regular customers. No Avinode and other broker stuff ever (I leave out all the evil words that come to my mind when I think about that kind of flying because they would get censored). That alone made it a good company for me. In the last years we got excellent training (simulator twice per year for every type flown) too. What we never had was a stable roster.
Originally Posted by
His dudeness
Lets face it, there are a lot of Operators in G/A one wouldn´t want to work for. And then there are really good ones.
NetJets for example is usually considered to be a very good employer in our sector. But I would never want to fly for them. They have a stable (!) roster of 6 on and 5 off and good pay and good planes and mainly decent customers and extras and the best training and everything else. But 6 on and 5 off means that I would be away from home 15 full days every month (1/2 of one's adult life if one only flew for them), spend 15 nights in hotels every months, need to go looking for a restaurant with my coleague 15 nights a month and do at least 6 proceedings every month. All of that I profoundly hate and it is incompatible with the kind of life I have always lived and want to live in the future. My social life takes place close to my home and person-to-person and with people of my choice, not on a mobile phone from wherever the company sends me.
Regards
Max
(*) I am directly employed by the aircraft owner mainly for his corporate flying needs. The plane however is placed under an AOC and some of the flying is for their customers. So I know both - corporate flying (good) and broker/charter flying (bad)...