Originally Posted by
Truetoga
Very interesting perspective. I think to be honest they won’t offer much of a difference to the ME3, definitely a better package but with the experience needed or described, those pilots are likely to have families which having them live in Saudi vs Dubai or Abu Dhabi might be a bigger shock for most Westener families. I suppose thats why they’ve offered trainers the commuting contracts to make sure the package makes it easy for them to leave their family in a western development.
There’s no doubt Riyadh eventually will become more western but these things take time. I mean how many expats move to Dubai and its usually the family that wants to leave…but who knows what they’ll offer now. Hopefully as you say a significantly better package.
In order to meet the Kingdom’s economic growth requirements it’s necessary for Saudi to develop an international airline bigger than Emirates in a much, much shorter time period much. That will immediately cause a bottleneck for flight crew as soon as their aircraft orders start to arrive in significant numbers. Bear in mind that none of the Saudi airlines need to be profitable, in their early years, as the main purpose of the airline is spur economic growth and economic diversity.
From what I saw of the aviation consultant’s report, undertaken for the Saudi Ministry of Transport by UK consultants that helped EasyJet grow from “GO” I’ve little doubt that RIA will grow in size very rapidly indeed-much, much faster than the growth rate of Emirates. That will demand very significant quantities of flight crew indeed to accomplish. If KIA needs the pilots but is the cause of the shortage, well it’s inevitable that they’ll have to pay to get the crews they need. They know it already. It’s all accounted for in the Kingdom’s airline development strategy.
Back in the late 70’s & early 80’, a long time before Emirates was even on the tarmac, the original Saudi Arabian Airlines began a rapid expansion, particularly on long haul routes, utilising Lockheed L1011 Tristars & B747 SP’s. At that time they needed very experienced crews to operate those aircraft on a multitude of new routes.
Back then Saudi was even more out on a limb as a destination for expat pilots than it is now. In order to attract enough of the right quality crews what they simply did, via TWA, was to offer twice the salary (tax free) of a “top scale” BA Longhaul Captain, plus overtime, free housing, generous allowances & private schooling. This was sufficiently attractive to tempt senior pilots from both BA & TWA to take early retirement & join Saudia. It was so much of a good deal, those that knew of it, quickly realised it was a much better deal than the best expatriate flying jobs around at that time-Cathy Pacific, Iran Airways, Singapore Airlines, Gulf Air & Kuwait Airways. Airways.
Subsequently, foreign Bases were utilised by Saudi Airlines. This effectively meant the crews were home based but with extended trip pairings laying over in Saudi or elsewhere..