" Negotiated work place agreement" Almost fell off my chair when I read that one on the middle east forum!!!
JAROPS
As has been said a million times on this forum, you can not expect the views of this forum to help you make your mind up if EK is worth leaving a left hand seat job for or not. That is entirely up to you. The forum may spark a few questions to be asked when you are here.
For some driving a car with a large engine is all they need to be happy here it seems...for otheres EK beats the pants off the two bit outfit they were employed at before here, so they to are happy.
The equipment, layovers, destinations here are all great. Don't think you will find too many who have any complaints about those.
A few things have changed dramatically recently, and most of these have been to the detrement of the pilot body.
Firtsly;
1. Bid system changed....in itself not such a bad thing. And if it were allowed to work the way it was designed this could have been a very good thing ideed. But it would seem, that this change, and the focus of one management type, to stop pilots having strings of days off, has meant that rosters of 100 to 110 hrs with min (8) days off are now concidered the norm for Captains. Would you believe that one Captain I know, even had a less productive roster reissued to him, to limit his days off!!!!
2. Stick hour Vs block hour change. When flying on a heavy crew, the amount of the actual block time to be used when calculating max flying hours per month is reduced. Hence it is now legal here to fly more than 100hrs in 28days if those hours were done while flying long haul and heavy crew. See above note re rosters!
3. New Way of calculating pay. The pilot body has just recieved a pay cut. This has been in the pipeline for some time. Pilots are no longer payed for duties that are not done within an airplane ie reserve duties (and we now get lots of these), SEP training, Licence renewals are now all done for free.
These three changes happened independently of each other...but all have a pretty big effect on the package and moral at EK. And all happened with no say at all from the pilot body!!
Airbus FOs have just been told that their commands are going to slow down for while.......but DECs may be required to fill vacancies on the Boeing. Of note here, DECs do not need to be type qualified to join. So they will be offered a transition course, where as FOs here will not. Now I hope that this situation does change, as things around here often do, but I guess you can see this has not helped the moral of the Bus FOs.
Other things you need to find out about if they effect you are places at schools, time to command etc etc.
So to some up. Come on over and jump through the hoops. Stay a bit longer if you can, and take a good look around. If you have friends here, sit them down and pick their brains of what it is really all about. Ask as many questions as you can at the interview....but make sure you have enough info to make a truely balanced decision. As the costs of moving here, then moving home are great.
Good luck.
Don