Originally Posted by
myturn
Totally agree Telfer86, quite an informative and relevant perspective.
Well not really....
Virgin pilots earn OT at 69 hours a roster. And at 69 hours a roster - that’s 790 hours a year. Yes sim, etc counts towards that. But try doing 70-80 hours a month for 12 months....
No one is calling out what’s actually in the article. Our Singaporean friend identifies 3 key issues that he says isn’t being dealt with (the debt, the leases, and employee wage costs). The administration process will deal with a fairly large chunk of the debt - so he is wrong on that front. The administrator is currently talking to lessors and renegotiating leases for a new owner will definitely form part of the DOCA - so he is wrong on that front too. And thirdly - the administrator has said he won’t be making anyone redundant (the administrator doesn’t need to - most people are stood down and then redundancy payments become an issue if he decides to sack a couple 1000 people). The business is being sold as a going concern - so that’s all the employees. If a new owner decided to shrink the business, they can do that. A new owner may also enter into negotiations with unions as well - there might be some pretty big trading going on to secure jobs. So he is arguably wrong on that front too.
And whilst he may be a successful businessman - he operates a lot of monopoly routes, and also quite a lot of government regulated (and subsidised) routes. And they have just got an absolute bucketload of cash to continue operating those routes (disproportionately large when compared to what QF and VA got relative to total revenues - I suppose having a former National Party politician on your Board doesn’t hurt). And he has never addressed the elephant in the room - fleet replacement.
I am not necessarily convinced people here are taking joy out of what’s happening to VA (although comments insinuating VA pilots are overpaid suggest some people are), but there are a lot of people rehashing the same nonsense over and over again. Every time a journalist puts out a piece of ‘expert aviation commentary‘, there are plenty of people on here who attack minute details. When an article is published highlighting the demise of Virgin, there are plenty of people on here who take every word as gospel without checking any of the facts, or applying some common sense.