Originally Posted by
Plastic787
The suitability for Long Haul thing is a bit of a red herring in my opinion. The way the BA sim assessment always worked was that if you passed the sim you were deemed capable of passing any BA type rating, including the long haul fleets.
For a long time a few people (more than a few) started turning down Short Haul offers - against good advice to get the earliest possible start date - and were holding out in favour of Long Haul positions. Then as word got out about the reality of Short Haul after the loss of the duty rig this trickle of course declinations turned into a flood. This obviously started creating headaches for Pilot Recruitment which they quickly got tired of.
So the long and the short of it is they then introduced this whole “suitable for long haul” tickbox which conveniently then enabled them to force people’s hands and say to them that they were deemed unsuitable for long haul, take it or leave it.
Even if you take the view that this is a nonsense conspiracy theory the unavoidable conclusion is that they must then have to some extent or another dumbed down either the sim assessment itself or the standard required to be met as previously anyone the trainers deemed to be unsuitable for long haul would have failed the assessment full stop.
I don’t think they have lowered standards, at least Balpa will tell you that, so that leaves you with the conclusion that it’s a tool to stop people turning down the first offer in the hope of a long haul offer. Dont read too much into being told you’re suitable for long haul or otherwise as I think it’s a load of nonsense.
The absolute gem of wisdom in here is to get the earliest start date you can. It makes a huge difference - you may want to fly the big iron but seniority moves a lot faster in short haul AND when and if you move across to LH you will be moving in above anyone who joined as a DEP LH after you did. You are only junior once (or rather, you only CHOOSE to be junior once), why not do it on a fleet where currently you’ll be moving double figure percentage points in seniority within 12 months… you’ll be junior for a comparatively short period and can then move to a less junior LH position.