I usually lurk and not post on threads such as this one, but I feel I can’t let the following comment from
IXNAT pass unremarked.
What is your response to the fact that you took and are taking UAE nationals' jobs by coming to the desert.
IXNAT, your comment displays a depth of ignorance of the situation in Dubai and in EK that is truly breathtaking. (Some would be tempted to say that it closely parallels the ignorance all too often displayed by your government in dealing with a larger and far more serious situation in this part of the world.)
Where does one start trying to explain to someone so obviously totally out of touch? Let me put it this way. The day an Expat pilot “takes the job of a local pilot in EK”, I’ll sink my whole fortune into setting up a company selling pork futures on the Riyadh stock exchange.
As has been said already, being a pilot isn’t a job too many of the local lads aspire to. The vast majority would much rather become CEO of one of their father’s many companies – preferably about ten minutes after graduating from college.
The ones who do become pilots are almost all from not so well off families. (There are exceptions.) And what might surprise someone fed on a poisoned diet of US Fox News, with
very few exceptions, they’re a damn fine bunch of young men and a pleasure to fly with. But many of not most of them put as much time into setting up businesses and running them as they do flying, to the point where most of them much prefer doing out and back single day flights to multi day away ones, (which they leave as much as possible to the idiot expats).
Add to that a very small local population base (less than 20% of the country’s total population are Emarati), and you don’t (at least yet) get enough local applicants to fill the needs of the airline.
Despite this, EK (read: the ruling family) is positively encouraging ‘locals’, (as the Emaritis are almost universally known here), to take up training to become pilots (and every other skilled position within the airline). And I can assure you, if they could, they would replace every expat with a local pilot tomorrow. And if that day should ever come to pass, they would terminate the contract of every expat pilot so quickly, we’d all be out of the country before the ink dried on our letters of termination.
Just as, I dare say we (or you) would do if the roles were to be reversed.