It cannot be cheaper to pay for business tickets home and losing seat revenue.
With so much of EK flying now ULH, it would be a simple matter to build two dovetailing rosters that had Pilot 'A' flying a service into the port where Pilot 'B', the other half of the dovetailing roster takes it on back to Dubai.
I don't mean he takes over the same flight that day, but the same flight the next day that the incoming pilot would have done if he was on a standard roster. Reserve cover could be easily provided if part of the deal was that Pilot 'A' would have to take the flight out if Pilot 'B' goes sick.
Just like women pilots and pilots with no jet time now being acceptable to EK where once they weren't, basings or rosters written around a remote base
will happen eventually - but only when it is forced on them and they see no other way to fill seats at the pointy end.
In the meantime,
CaptProp's comment is spot on - the whole object of the exercise is that we pour as much as possible (and more) of what they pay us back into Dubai Inc. That is the reason expats were allowed to buy real estate in the UAE - and look how successful that has been so far, both for Dubai Inc. and many of the pilots who got into the Dubai RE market early.
If basings or pseudo basings ever do come to pass, perhaps one way they could introduce it and not open the proverbial floodgates would be to limit such basings to pilots who had been in the company for 'n' years (say 10?).
I appreciate that this would cut the FOs out of the equation, but at least in the initial stages of any such scheme, I don't think the FOs could expect to be included, if only for the reason given by
CaptProp.
There's hope something like this may come to pass, for the EK pilot group, as much as it might have grown, is becomeing a smaller and smaller part of the expat population in Dubai. I see in an article in the Melbourne Age that after the enormous expansion in Dubai over the last few years, the percentage of the Dubai population made up of UAE Nationals has now dropped to 3%, where the overall UAE figure is something under 20%. (It was around 18% in Dubai ten years ago.)
The whole article might be of interest to some:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...091278406.html