Air Atlanta Icelandic

[VS1711]

Ok here’s my five good and five bad. I’ll start with the good;

• A lot of good low-time guys got their start with AAI. To echo Ganbare’s point the company isn’t sufficiently discriminating about who they hire but there are guys who’ve deservedly benefited from that and grown into accomplished airmen (as well as quite a few scary people who have been and continue to be a major liability). Where it works well you see a new guy spending a lot of time in the company of a seasoned pro who’s paid their dues and when it falls down you’ll see a new guy sitting next to a guy who’s washed out of every respectable company that’s ever let him through the door or is only in the seat because of his nationality. Neither of them really know what they’re doing in that instance and it’s a miracle the company hasn’t had worse incidents.
• In times when the industry was stagnant and pilots were out of work, AAI was hiring. Unfortunately much of the HR department lives in Iceland and pay very little attention to the hiring market so they still act like the entire profession is on the breadline and should be grateful for the work. In fact it's largely greenhorns and the unemployable who take work on that basis now.
• If you can take the working conditions (uncertainty, time away from home, low pay) working at AAI can still be a great experience. You wouldn’t want to do it for too long though unless you’re willing to basically live out of a suitcase all year round.
• The conditions of work are such that you build great friendships working at AAI (with your peers, the management prefer not to mix with the working stiffs and the quickest way to stall your career in AAI Ops to be perceived as being “too close to the crew”, which points to the underlying issues).
• To a large degree the management has changed. Unfortunately the insular nature of Icelandic management is such that I get a sense the new Icelanders are only listening to the old Icelanders and no-one’s asking the difficult questions like “Why do we have such massive churn in our crew?”, “Why are our training costs so high?”, “Have we looked at the cost (expressed as churn and training costs) versus the benefits (evaded tax and lower crew costs) of treating our crew this way?”. Let’s not forget AAI loses money.

Ok now the bad. I don’t need five points here.

The company has a two-tier system for employing pilots. Airborne crew are on significantly worse terms than the others. These irony is that these are the guys who are the most flexible and keep the whole shebang running.

Calling employees “contractors” was reasonable when the company started because contracts were short term and the company virtually shut down between them. The ACE way of working allowed the company to be flexible about hiring crew and it allowed the crew to maximise their earnings from uncertain work. Continuing to work that way and worse yet to impose these rules on “unfavoured crew” based largely on nationality when the company has long-term contracts is unfair, anti-competitive and could be seen as large-scale tax evasion.


Leaving Airborne out of it for now; if you pay for people’s training, give them credit for tenure and promise them advancement based on experience gained within the firm (thus creating implicit pressure to conform to practices that they perceive put their licenses at risk and compromise their independence), hire them contiguously for long periods without explicitly breaking and re-signing the contracts, pay their travel to and from your bases and communicate directly with them on matters such as the transfer from ACE to Airborne you employ those people.

Coming to the matter of Airborne, by forcing your employees to work through a shady intermediary to evade corporate responsibilities you marginalise those crewmembers. All crew should have the option of being on the firm’s books as employees or choosing to remain contractors and enjoy the tax efficiencies. Yes your personnel costs would go up (although hiring professionals to manage the process might give you options you didn’t know you had to offset cost) but you might find your training costs stabilise, you retain the people you want to retain and while there will always be guys who think their lives would improve if they didn’t pay tax, you’d have the option of deploying them to tax-efficient bases. You’ll also start to offset the risk that a tax or AML authority somewhere will look for and find the rumoured link in beneficial ownership between Airborne and AAI (past or present) which could lead to very severe repercussions for everyone connected.

So there’s my suggestion. Bite the bullet and acknowledge that your most valued asset, a lot of dedicated people who go the extra mile, are a true asset. If you’re losing money year on year anyway you need to mix things up a bit.