Little Prince
You decided to jump ship early, many of us chose not to for various reasons. Now though, the deal is about to be done and most of us will happily fly a 145 or Dash with flybe on the side rather than British Airways and then move across to a Q400 when the time comes, assuming the Q400 pay scale moves out of the dark ages and approaches that of the 146 - I guess the exodus of crews off the Q400 will force the company to address that anomaly sooner rather than later
. Fortunately, we are bringing a substantial amount to the flybe table - long established routes, prime time slots and several million passengers. You know as well as we do that BA will distort the figures to suit themselves about how much of a loss we are making. Bear in mind that many of our troubles are down to BAR integration and we are still paying the price. BA want rid of their non core activities regardless of profit or loss in much the same way that CitiExpress dumped profitable routes and bases to make their presentations at Waterworld look impressive as our top class management improved the efficiency of our operation ( a quick check with Eastern, Southwest and Loganair should confirm how well those routes were actually performing). Personally I spend my days hauling nearly full Embraers off runways every day and I dont believe our commercial performance is nearly as bad as WW makes out. So as the 2 airlines merge so will the seniority lists. flybe has a massive order for new aircraft which they need to allocate to routes which are established and will make money - we are bringing them. You need more access to major European hubs like FRA and CDG - we are bringing that too. Finally to service these routes, you need crews and plenty of them - again we come as part of the package. Most of us have joined this company when it was Loganair, Manx, BRAL or Brymon - we are experienced at turboprop operations in the regions, where money was tight, turnrounds were quick and we all mucked in. Most of us will fit in well to flybe, but to suggest we slot in at the bottom of your seniority list is neither fair nor reasonable and it wont happen. We are looking forward to the future and so should you. With integration should come a chance to improve your existing Ts and Cs and salaries without impacting on profits as crews choose to stay and training costs reduce. With the massive growth and revenue we are about to bring to flybe this could be a good time for both pilot groups and help secure the continued success of flybe in a desperately competitive industry
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