Originally Posted by
Flash Blackman
Interesting. So even though the lads at the top aren’t flying they potentially sit on pay? Do the regionals have the same downgrade facility to even the ranks? Are they essentially grounding the 777?
There's currently enough flying for maybe 200 Pilots... at the most. So there's going to be a lot of us sitting around doing nothing and getting paid for it. This is where QF has a distinct advantage in terms of cash-flow as it's illegal in NZ to forcibly stand your workers down on LWOP as AJ did. So it's either pay them to stay home or pay them redundancy... which still requires 3 months notice (or 3 months pay) & the Redundancy pay. For the 387 (280 Jet Pilots as T&R don't get redundancy pay), their Redundancy will range from 6 weeks to ~ 3 months pay. The farther up the List they go, the more redundancy costs up to a maximum of 54 weeks. Assuming the pilots don't opt for Furlough that is.
So what's the alternative?
Obviously redundancies based on today's flying (Domestic is running at 1% capacity I believe) is simply out of question.
If they decided to make half of us redundant, that would cost a fortune in redundancy payouts, ground the A320 fleet, and it takes around 3 months to transition from the Widebody to line check on the A320
under normal circumstances.
So really, they have no choice but accept a cash burn in wages. Make Pilots Redundant based on predicted future numbers without grounding the only fleet doing any work and then down-train ahead of the rebound as required.
777 Pilots are slowly going uncurrent. They've got a few freight charters to LAX at the moment (3 a week I believe) and are on call for any rescue charters that come up. Most of the flying is going to the Standards Pilots to keep the current.
Once we come out of level 4 lockdown, potentially the SIMs will open up again and we'll rotate through to keep current and then go on call. But hard to say.
Not sure what the Regionals contracts say, but I believe a lot of clauses around redundancy and down-training are similar to ours.