Originally Posted by
ROH111
It’s interesting that Qantas is hiring so heavily into mainline.
There are retirements, sure, but not that many that you need 10 new starters per fortnight.
5 x A380 to crew, the equivalent of 2 330s that aren’t flying a full schedule and a couple more 787s. The current 330 and 737 fleets are short of crew. Slightly more crew will be needed to assist the transition from 737 to 321XLR as of next year, to cover those in training, and the year after that they’ll be needing crew for 12 x A351 which will all be expansion supposedly. 2025 is also when the effects of the VR a wear off and retirements at 65 start again at high levels.
So reading the tea leaves it’s easy to see that figures of 200 new recruits per year for 5 years are accurate.
My theory is, Qantas is fed up with the high rate of attrition at all their subsidiaries. They are hiring on their new EBA agreed upon “B scale” pay and will shortly announce they have “over employed” to mainline and it’s either: go take LWOP and work for Cobham, Alliance or National Jet or you’re fired.
Well Cobham is now not a group entity, so you’ve got that wrong. Given the progression of a Pilot’s career most of those new hires wouldn’t go back to a regional, they’d progress elsewhere. Example being in 2014 when LWOP was arranged for mainline pilots to EK. They know that if they were ‘over employed’ in mainline pilots they would want to progress further on in their careers not backwards.
It happened during the GFC when a bunch of good blokes were forced to go to JQ or lose their jobs….
Those who went under the MOU were moderately senior and weren’t at risk of losing their job. Their rank perhaps but not their job.
Makes sense doesn’t it? No one will quit the subsidiary, quitting there is quitting QF. Employees for life.
No as being on the mainline seniority list is for life. There were pilots who previously took mainline LWOP to a group entity but quit before that time was up, and spent the remainder of their LWOP period elsewhere outside the group. It did not effect their return to mainline.