Originally Posted by
Ollie Onion
To be honest, if you can get a redundancy payout and then retain your seniority with future jobs being offered to redundant pilots in order then that would be a better outcome financially for quite a few pilots as opposed to just an endless period of LWOP. I just feel sorry for all of us who through no fault of our own or our companies have potentially seen our flying careers knocked on the head. So many mates who have lost and are losing jobs with many, including myself, just waiting for the axe to fall.
I'd say the Jury is still out on LWOP vs Redundancy.
To be re-hired after Redundancy you need to be Current (at the moment)... not easily done when there's not going to be any Jobs anytime soon. Would also be extremely difficult to self fund currency after taking a massive drop in pay with whatever Job you can find outside of Flying.
If you are Re-Hired, all your service benefits get reset, including starting back again on Year 1 pay. Some of the more Senior Pilots facing the Axe will be on years 5-6 Pay, so potentially would be on Year 8 (SO/FO Cap) when re-hired if they take LWOP.
Of course, as the Contracts written, LWOP is not a choice. As Redundancy is Last on First off, a Pilot who opts for LWOP could still be made redundant so we're awaiting word from the Unions and the Company if Redundant Pilots will be offered the choice of LWOP instead, and what the conditions of both are in terms of re-employment.
Sadly, one of the biggest consequences are those who hold Jet Positions with Seniority below Regional Pilots on LWOP. A Regional Pilot who is "made redundant" from the Jet Fleet will retain their ATR/Q300 Command due to their high Link Seniority. When it comes to Re-Hiring, however, last off first on applies so Jet Pilots below the 110 or so Tag & Release Pilots could be waiting a very very long time to get their Jobs back. I doubt a Redundancy situation, let alone one of this scale, was considered when Tag & Release was signed off on. Not to be down on the Tag & Release Pilots, it's not their fault things played out this way, but they've at least still got Jobs.
In terms of Raw numbers, 387 off the bottom leaves us with 822 Pilots. A320 Commands start around 750, but there's a lot of Senior SO's between 822 & 750 so there will be very few remaining A320 FO's.
The 387 Number came with a disclaimer that it's the starting point. The Company simply forecast a schedule for next year and said "At Optimal IP (flying hours)" they need 387 less Pilots. Optimal, I believe, is around 75 hour Rosters. Redundancies can only occur when Average hours drop below 60, and can only be applied to bring the average back above 60, not to a 75 "optimum".
Retirements will also factor into the number off the bottom as will Voluntary Severance or other voluntary measures. The more off the top, the less off the bottom.
Lastly, the logistics of re-shuffling the remaining Pilots also needs to be accounted for... that's an awful lot of seat changes filtering from the Top to the Bottom.
So the message is, panic slowly. 387 is simply a number generated by the forecasting models. How that number is practically achieved, and how many are actually let go off the bottom is yet to be determined. All things considered, the number of Redundancies
should be less than 387. That's not to say however, there isn't a second wave farther down the track. A lot of assumptions are being made around the future of International travel.