Londonmet.
I still stand by my original answer to your question. If I seem to moan it’s because XL could be a truly excellent airline to work for, but for the moment at least, it is not.
You ask what morale is like. On the 757,767 and no doubt the 747,it is very low. The airline is going through a period of fleet change and people are concerned about their futures. With sound good management, and by management I do not include trainers or even fleet managers, as they have little to say in steering company policy, this should be a time of open discussion of what might be. It should include regular senior management communications laying down ideas of how things might proceed. XL do not conduct business like this. They prefer to keep their plans close to their chests. They are happy to allow rumours to fly, making their crews even more uncertain and unhappy. As I said before, with the CEO we have at the moment, I’m not sure he could express himself well enough to get the message across anyway!
Our situation has not been helped by the AAE/XL merger. Not one manager from AAE was retained and apart from a new CP from outside the company, the majority of senior Flt Ops and department managers are Sabre/Excel. The fleets never really integrated. I had no great love of AAE, it was a necessary stop gap to break away from AAI. I am told it was also a great improvement on that company. Joining Excel/XL should have been a greater improvement still. But it wasn’t. Even the Head of Training, who is now on the 757/767 fleet has remarked at how distant he feels from XL now he is on his new fleet! All this leaves most of the 757/767 and 747 fleet feeling very exposed. Many are leaving. I can think of 18 who are about to hand in their resignations or are in the process of resigning from the 757/767s. Another 4 are rumoured to be going. Two are Training captains. They have not been moaning minnies, just people who see the writing on the wall. The TCX/MYT redundancies might be XL’s saviour, particularly if some of those applicants are experienced A330 crew.
In the vacuum of no or incoherent management communications, rumours abound. Recent examples include the cancellation of the cadet programme, taking on three DECs two of which are not rated, no internal command upgrades for the next 4 years and so on. Management’s silence in the face of these rumours almost makes you feel they are happy for them to exist. Perhaps the mathematics of resignation are more advantageous to those of redundancy.
The one thing that makes me hang on is the people I work with, as opposed to those I work for! And who knows, the last rat to leave becomes the Captain doesn’t he?
Reading the ramblings of Lou Stulewater rather reminded me of the latest company report by our CEO..could they possibly be the same person I wonder or did they just go to the same school??