Originally Posted by
MD80rookie
I am ex SAS and this is my view:
There is no hope for a solution to the conflict between management and pilot unions. The management simply don't want unions, they want to control everything. The unions presented an offer with a total saving of about 30% in salaries and increased production, but management said no. The idea, hatched and nourished by a few individiuals in the top (not the CEO actually), is to have production platforms that produce traffic with various aircrafts in different sizes depending on demand. This means of course that every second or third year the bidding war will start over again and every supplier risks losing the contract with SAS, therefore the cost hunt will never stop. SAS Ireland, SAS Estonia, SAS Lithuania, SAS Moldovia, the possibilities are endless. Of course, the customer experience is promised to be identical.... This concept is called "enhanced operating model". The only thing that is not enhanced in this concept is management and head office where business is more or less unchanged. Many administrative colleagues have been laid off, placed in other departments but the ones still working received a yearly pay increase. SAS Ireland and SAS Link will "buy" services from SAS infrastructure, crew planning / ops / support functions.
SAS seems to be in limbo right now. They have called back about 100 pilots that were laid off in 2020, still there are 450 pilots left. As traffic demand picks up, restrictions in europé are lifted, the hiring would need to accelerate as well. From what I know, only a very limited number of pilots have been hired for the SAS Ireland base in Copenhagen.
Yes, the plan is to assign all future Neo deliveries to SAS Ireland.
Yes, it will be a conflict between SAS management and the unions this spring. SAS still has some 800-900 pilots employed, and the majority of traffic in terms of passenger numbers is flown by SAS Scandinavia (funny, what else would SAS be if not Scandinavia?) and all long haul flights are operated by SAS.
Thanks for an insightful answer.
What does the unions want to avoid conflict? That all laid off pilots in "main" SAS get priority into SAS connect and SAS link before any external recruitment or that SAS connect and SAS link gets scrapped as a whole?