Déjà Vu,
I know several people who currently work for that section and I definitely do not hear comments like that about working there. In fact the comments are so far from that posted by the previous poster that it does make me wonder if maybe there was something else at play that isn’t being told.
What was possibly so bad that they were left tainted forever? I know some people may not always enjoy working for particular companies, but what could possibly happen that they would get onto a public forum and bash them to that extent?
I have several years of working for one of the sections of the RFDS, but it probably wasn’t recent enough that I could give any valid commentary on their current retention problems.
However, aviation in Australia*as a whole is also very different than what it was 10-15 years ago. There’s a different generation of pilots who just want to skip over all that GA stuff and move straight to a jet. Most of these will never return back to GA and fill roles in companies like the RFDS. Also, at least when I worked there, the job is not the same as it was 20+ years ago, when people were happy to retire in that job. It was a busy, hard job. Sure you got lots of days off generally, but when you were at work, the duties were often 12+ hours, and the additional tasks you carry out just helps add to that fatigue. There’s a lot of night flying, most years I was there, at least 50-55% of my yearly total was night hours.
Flying part of it aside, yes there was some administrative changes over the whole organisation that probably made it less of that friendly company it was 20+ years ago, but I certainly wouldn’t say that I despised them to the point of getting on here and bashing the **** out of them.