Originally Posted by
excrab
I can't help thinking that a "senior captain" who says that a seniority system which results in the junior guys (and least experienced) pilots going to the most difficult destinations whilst the senior (and most experienced) pilots can cherry pick the easy flights is a good system is showing a remarkably high level of self interest and a remarkably low level of care for flight safety or the travelling public in general. FZ has this seniority system for one reason, and that is to try to retain pilots without having to pay salary increments as a reward for length of service. And despite what High Energy says the junior pilots do get the difficult flights. My first flight after completing line training as a DEC (which consisted entirely of four sector days around the Gulf) was to Kabul, with a second officer who had also never seen the place. I was lucky in that I joined with 15000 + hours in world wide ops, with a lot of 737 time. But sending DECs with 3 or 4 thousand hour total time to some of the horrid places FZ operate to, especially in winter, whilst the experienced senior pilots are sitting around in hotels in Zanzibar or Prague shouldn't really be the purpose of retaining experienced pilots.
The only good thing at the moment is that with the max grounding the experience levels are going up, but once it starts flying again and DEC recruitment restarts because there isn't enough training capacity to do all the upgrades then the potential is there for more problems, just as it always has been.
Fair point but the thread was actually started to find out info on whether FD had nearly lost another aircraft in an upset. It is a rumour network after all and it would be nice to know.