Originally Posted by
ruserious
You may be right Vorsicht, however there is a strong possibility that Mr Ed is being economical with the facts. I guess like all things at starfleet command, we will never know the truth
Starfleet Command - that's great. I hope it sticks. Regarding the 20/40/300 rumour - As I heard it, as of about a month ago, 45 applicants who met the qualifications and who had yet to be interviewed were left in the "pool". Overall success rate of about 50% (the 1 in 6 may be referring to DEC applicants) thus the 20 figure. It's all rumour anyway but the fact is that the well is drying up due to various reasons, one of which is that most pilots out there are well aware of the egregious overreaching by the company regarding pilot productivity. (Has anyone in management ever admitted that factoring was a mistake?)
As the crewing gets tighter, I would expect the atmosphere to get nastier. Rumours of revised sick time policy, extension of the annual limit as well as the fact of less access to call out pay screams that the screws are being put to the Flight Ops Managers. The entire management structure at Emirates is designed to tie the hands of middle managers regarding real solutions to problems. This airline is ruled from the very top. If flights begin to go uncrewed in any substantial way, I would expect to see some fairly public examples being made before anyone actually tries to solve the problems by tackling the root causes. In short, I believe that it will get much worse before it gets any better (I hope that I'm wrong).
Is anyone really surprised by the atmosphere right now? Part of what we are seeing happens every year about this time. We start hearing the ominous warnings of "no profit share" followed by a mad dash of knee jerk cost cutting to impove the short term figures and damn the long term consequences. Remember it was about this time when we took our paycuts (I'm sorry, "cost neutral pay adjustment") due to the changes in pay and credit calculation. I check my company email with dread wondering "what have they done now".