My experience with Ryanair

[flycheaper]

Hello,

It's make nearly one year that i have join Ryanair and i always promised myself to wright some words here when i would have made my own idea of this company, i have some time now so here is my thinking....
Before joining i have for sure read all the threads on pprune from top to bottom and from bottom to top, no need to say that with all the "mauvaises langues" here i was totally afraid and wondering myself if i was not doing a mistake... For the records i joined them with a 737 TR and some hours on the machine so i paid nothing nor for a T/R or for the OCC course.

The OCC course and the Line Training was at a really great standard of professionalism and security. Your progress is followed day by day by a very accurate computerized system and by reports wrote by the LT captain after each flight. For sure it's tough to reach the desired standard but never i felt under negative pressure or rushed to achieve it, (by example you have to achieve the turn around in 25 minutes but if you are not completely ready then no big deal it will be 30,35 minutes but at least you will have learn how to do better the next time)(btw from my pilot point of view a turn around of 25 minutes is totally possible without rush and with respect of security).
The staff in East Midland Training was really helpful and tried to do there best to make your training more easy.

Now concerning my everyday life, i enjoy the wonderful spanish sun with a comfortable 5 days on, 4 days off roster and every night i am in my bed, I can assure you that for your couple and family life it's really helpful... Speaking about quality of life, i have never been so healthy than since i am with FR, no wonder with the fantastic food that my wife do me for each of my flight and the water... one bottle and "Britta" do the rest.

Concerning the salary, there also i am totally happy, the first six month i was bringing home an average of 2500€/net, since then I am on an average of 3500€/net and it's seem that in the future with the new deal it will climb to an average of 4000€/net. I have personally taken a loss of license insurance/pension for +-300€ a month which assure me of a rent of 5000€/month in case of problems and i have the social insurance in the country where my base is. Not so bad i find for a new FO.

The work by itself is really enjoying me with a great bunch of people around, an amazing network of destinations giving me a lot of experience and a brand new fleet with a really good maintenance which give me the opportunity to achieve my job with security and professionalism.

if i have to give some negatives points, i would say that it's tricky to find the good person to who to speak when you have a question or a problem but with the time you do your own list of contact numbers. An other one which annoy me the most is the difficulty to get your planning or to connect to the intranet system from the friday afternoon to the monday morning.

So to conclude i would say that in my case Ryanair is a really positive experience for sure you don't have a red carpet to go to the aircraft and nobody give a f*** that you are a pilot, you are there to do a job from A to B to A and then you go home. Just to be clear i am based in continental Europe with a Ryanair contract, so my experience most probably is not similar as the experience of pilots based in England, Ireland or contractor.

Hope it will help and moderate some writers full of anger and blackness.

Have a nice landing or an happy take off...