Excuse Me!
Landed in Abidjan during the week and met up with some pilot buddies on the ramp from Slok and gathered Air Tanzania is accepting CV from a lot of unemployed pilots on the west coast.
There are a lot of top guys in that region (Liberia, Conakry, Freetown, Lome, douala and cotonou e.t.c....) and I guess when we say retired we have to define it properly, are we saying retired becos they are at the age to retire or were they forced into retirement at middle age due to the predicament they found themselves after the demise of most african airlines in east and west africa.
Here in Lagos due to the current airline growth the latter is the case and a lot of the guys are returning and I think its great.
The fact remains that along the west african region exist a lot of pilots who found themselves out of a job due to the downward trend of our airlines in this area and with the current and exiting trend now these guys are returning, in conakry alone the number of pilots in their middle ages is spectacular and could help out with a lot of the airlines in the region.
Another issue is how to get the message passed on to reach most of our brothers who are still eligible to fly in some of this remote areas, putting up ads like what Air Tanzania did in Flight International a few months back is good, but the point I am trying to make fellas is how many of them get to pick up a copy of FI in this region and even if they do how current is the issue!
Even the internet is a no go area when it comes to some of these areas.
On my side its word of mouth and finding time on arrival in some of these remote areas to quickly say hello to the other crews and pass the message on about who is looking for crew and who to get in touch with.
We have a couple of pilots who lost jobs due to these reasons with and they are back flying with us after refresher courses, recurrencies achieved and line checks and its a pleasure to fly with them, and listen to their tales of what they went through after they left flying.
Majority of them still have the bug and I just dont want to imagine what they went through all this time away from the flightdeck.
Lets support the continent.
B
Last edited by BALEWA; 20th Oct 2007 at 16:00.