The point being missed is that cathay pilot training is and always has been a joke. You either bring experience and skills with you or you spend time building it in a do-it-yourself checking environment. A cadet who has just been checked out to the line at cathay can barely perform Scond Officer duties (not qualified for takeoffs and landings, a bare basic minimum of piloting skills and qualifications) In fact some can't make it on the 747 after much simulator training (due to not being able to handle an engine failure practice in the simulator) and have to be placed on the airbus which is easier to fly. This is a fact which has been repeated several times in the last few years. It will take them at least a couple of years of putting in the work to the point where they can barely perform as junior First Officers. It takes as much as 4 years for a fresh hired cadet to make it as a junior First Officer. This has nothing to do with being local or not. This is cathay. Cathay doesn't have the training resources or efficiency to hire and train any more than a couple of hundred pilots per year even if experienced ones are hired off the street as direct entry. They have to spend a lot of money and time to develop their training department into something which it is not even close to at present time. How will they fill the seats being vacated at an alarming rate up the chain? A cadet hired today has no chance of flying a cathay airplane even as a second officer for 1.5 to 2 years. You can't replace a 1000 experienced pilots with a 1000 cadets in short time. It's physically time, MONEY, and effort consuming. And MONEY consuming.
Regardless of the propaganda BS they're putting out, they're very concerned about the exodus of pilots which is already well underway even before covid recovery. What they're hoping will work is to increase pay and benefits to the point which at least slows the exodus until they have enough cheaper pilots online so they can again cut the pay and benefits back down to the low level it is now or even lower as much as they can.
But having zero credibility left as an employer it's curious to see how how many pilots will be desperate enough to work for such an employer. The genie they let out of the bottle in October 2021 by cancelling our "employment contracts" permanently and placing us on "company policy" under the threat of being fired in 2 weeks, which is amenable at company's full discretion in every possible way as often as they want, can never be put back into the bottle. Whoever was the genius behind this must be recognized for doing so eternally. Greg H. And the board of directors who went along with it.
Even if they again offer a document written in the form of "employment contract" in the future to say "ok we're offering you an actual contract again" , cathay has proven via legal precedence that an "employment contract" you sign with cathay isn't worth the toilet paper you're signing it on. They can again cancel it as they wish anytime they want. You're mentally ill if you consider any cathay employment document any more than toilet paper ever again. How can you possibly plan for retirement having no way of knowing how much your career earnings will be at Cathay in X amount of years? Hong Kong banks have been bulking at giving cathay pilots any loans because of this fact. Your earnings are no longer guaranteed at any level for any amount of time.
They'll spend much more money than they thought they'd save by cancelling all employment contracts to attract and keep pilots only for short terms. Training costs will have to skyrocket to replace the constant attrition rate. Utter failure is all cathay as a business deserves at this point. It's nice to sit back and watch with some popcorn and laugh. It will be many years to establish anything hoping to supply enough local pilots as replacements. In the meantime, a forced shrinkage of the airline due to lack of pilots. Even the locals they train will then have to be paid well enough to keep them from leaving. There's no way cathay will save money as a result of contract cancelation. In the end, it will cost them more money and they've lost employer credibility forever. They want to sell this taco stand to someone else and get out but it being a penny stock company at this point (near worthless) they'd need to re-establish it to raise the stock price and you can't do that when your airplanes don't have enough pilots to fly them when it's time to ramp up flight operations. They made the judgment they would have sold and be out in 2 years making the crew shortage someone else's problem and hong kong covid being nowhere near allowing a recovery has completely f'ed their delusional plans.
Popcorns...