Well now the rumour is official. Good input from those who could be objective and shame on those who turned it into a slanging match. Good Grief – no wonder pilots are not taken seriously when the best they have to offer is my country, airline, aircraft, is better, bigger etc than yours.
Obviously this development will irritate EK captains. However maybe it’s a step in the right direction. Perhaps pilots everywhere should be paid commensurate with their experience and/or abilities. After all this is how any other professional is paid. Pilots wish to be treated as white collar workers while behaving like blue collar. Unions have been keeping everyone under their leftist ethos for years and generally caused more chaos than otherwise.
Why should an experienced FO be paid the same as an inexperienced one? Why can’t you take your experience elsewhere? It would make a free pilot market. As we move from open skies to free skies perhaps we will move to free salaries. With the demise of flag carriers, so too will seniority and protectionism go. The profession is becoming global and nomadic.
EK will be subject to the same supply and demand as everyone else. Those pilots who have been overstepped in salary by DE captains will no doubt move to greener pastures given the opportunity, as the merits of loyalty have been concisely made clear. Companies will soon discover the cost of continually migrating pilots.