A few years ago, my airline decided to buy 4 747-400s rather than 4 747-300s. The cost of each 400 was around $35 million per unit, whereas each 300 would have been around $10 million per unit. I was a proponent of the 300. One of the issues, was the supression of the flight engineer position...
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We did not need the extra few nautical miles of range offered by the 400s, our sectors can be flown non-stop by 200s and 300s... The 300 has the same cabin configuration and passenger capacity as a 400...
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So the company bean-counters won, they got the 747-475s from Canada... and they could save on the salaries of flight engineers. But all our sectors with 747-400 are over 8 hours, therefore requiring a 3 pilot crew, captain, cruise-captain and first officer... so the unions and the company agreed to train our flight engineers to be cruise-first officers... 90% of our flight engineers accepted to become cruise-first officers, and kept their flight engineer salaries and high seniorities. We could have acquired the 300s that would not have required a "centavo" extra training, but instead, they spent a fortune in training the crews for the 400... at the time we were almost a bankrupt airline...
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Now, our ex-flight engineers are happy, but our bean-counters are not, since the hourly cost of a captain, a cruise-captain and a cruise-first officer as cockpit crew of a 400 is higher than a captain, a first officer and a flight engineer is in the 200/300...
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Nice thing is, with the 400, that the cruise-first officers (ex engineers) continue their duties as it was in the 200s... that is preflight walkaround, they participate in check-lists, in-flight documentation and logs... etc...
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We are left with 2 747-200s which I still fly, when they retire these planes, I will be retired too, as our policy is not to transition captains over age 60 to new equipment (I am 63)... so my revenge is, that they will have to pay me a full salary until I hit age 65, should they retire the 200s before my birthday...
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As far as my opinion is, I still believe a cockpit crew of 3 is better for departure and arrival, check-list perfomance, extra pair of eyes, and in case of a malfunction... or emergency...
Very happy contrails