Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
My goodness, what a dazzling fiesta of futility. Once again, IALPA and the short hairless pygmy they’ve elevated to be its windbag-in-chief have distinguished themselves by the sort of radiant inadequacy I only ever used to dream about in the turgid corridors of pilot unionism. How bleakly reassuring it is to observe with one’s own eyes that personal enmity is still being regurgitated by a pilots union president as being industrially relevant. Not only was Evan Cullen completely out of his depth in the debate on RTE’s Prime Time with our Chief Executive, but by every objectively measurable means, body language, demeanour, tone of voice, ill-fitting off-the-rack suit (and a shirt clearly two sizes too small), the Dwarf’s patently obvious lack of any intellectual merit was almost embarrassing. If not for the balefully humorous spectacle that always comes from such IALPA burlesque, his appearance was a total flop.
I think its long since past time for an injection of some truth when it comes to so-called fatigue. I can’t speak for other airlines, since I work as a Ryanair Captain, but in my case, a roster of 5 days on followed by a glorious 4 days off is, to my understanding, one of the best in the industry. Combine that with the small mountain of money I’m given each month for doing what I love and I’m a happy camper, but then so too are the vast majority of my colleagues, a fact not lost on the IALPA comedy hour, I can assure you, but more on that later. The only time IALPA has ever previously mentioned the subject of fatigue in Ryanair was over the completely bogus L.O’C beat up where a pilot, so embittered and non cooperative thanks entirely to IALPA’s perfidious sedition among the Dublin pilots, decided to refuse a reasonably allocated flight at the completion of a relatively short duty period. Everyone familiar with the case knows it for what it is, union grandstanding and totally false. L.O’C wasn’t fatigued in the least, and only decided he was after he found out he was in hot water, and then only after consultation with the Dwarf who seems to delight in using all and every opportunity to hurl nuisance and bogus claims of every imaginable industrial evil in the direction of our Chief Executive. Personal enmity masquerading as reasoned debate, in other words…..again.
The current manifestation of this phenomenon is the misbehaviour of the dozen or so members of the seriously pissed off pilot club in Dublin, those grey-haired millionaire prima donnas who, like so many drowning men clinging to the side of a leaky little rowboat called REPA, have been so comprehensively rebuked by the vast majority of the content and satisfied Ryanair pilot corps that they’ve been reduced to plastering REPA stickers all over our nice new ’06 registered crew vans and even nicer brand new 737-800’s. One presumes that defacing company property with stickers repeating the mantra of the damned three times yields some sort of spiritual satisfaction. God knows it amounts to little else.
Were you as certain of the strength of the non existent “unity unity unity” your little stickers claim to represent, Evan, you would abandon your clearly misguided aspirations toward a television career and start charging your membership the going rate for pilot union association, and at one percent of annual salary as I think the going rate is, you know as well as I do that if you did, your pointless, trouble making, Aer Lingus funded, jerk-off jamboree called REPA would vanish quicker than rats off the Lusitania.