SASless, silent?
Gagged... maybe!
I am, as always, open to offers. If you check with Doc Kupa you will discover that I was OIC condom distribution for the BRC in my previous life so that I could waft among the container bar patrons like an angel of mercy dispensing grace. Well, rubber johnnies actually, but it's almost the same thing. Could that be a big marketing point: You pay for the nightfighters but you get the accessories free? The later divorce still comes at full price, though.
You know that the guys who got rich from the gold rushes were the ones selling stuff to the prospectors. That is how Levi Strauss began, selling pantaloons. It might be so that there's more money to be made nowadays in the container bar business than in doing the flying. NEO is sure to have then numbers for this at his fingertips, along with just how much a generator will fetch nowadays on Fernando Po. (I know one won't fit through the door of a Dornier 328 because I measured it.)
You can all cheer up when I tell you that the outfit I work for now pays the Yanks and Canucks exactly the same numbers as the Yurpeens. The only tiny, tiny diffo is that Yanks get USD and the Yurpeens get Euros. What is losing 40% in the deal, anyway? Do they think pilots are stupid or something?
There is no moaning about CLA because there isn't any!
Expenses are paid at the rate of $34 USD per day. Try a day in Switzerland on that kind of money! You can blow all your expenses on one good meal drinking nothing but Apollinaris.
Travel inside Germany (for a work visa, one per tour needed and it is up to you to get it) is reimbursed at the rate of a second-class rail ticket, not the actual costs incurred. (I especially liked that "second-class" bit! It showed me just where I am in the food chain nowadays.)
Training is done in your time off and is not counted as duty time, thus not attracting duty pay.
On the other hand, travel is short. I hop over to Paris and then the onward journey to the desert is less than three hours. At the other end there is no, "What do you have for me?" or "Do you see me?" or even "Dis is ah SERIOSS HOFFENCE!!"
Something else that might cheer you all up, even though, yes, we are all plank drivers, sorry, Aviators, is that my back-to-back (30 years-old, frozen ATPL, just returned from PNG where he worked as a missionary pilot) quit after about a year on line to go fly a Dash 8 in the EU. Two other guys and a woman quit after him to do something similar. This is in the last four weeks, mind you.
The company is going mad trying to keep people, caught, it would seem, in a bind between paying as little as possible and not being able to keep people who have been hired and trained at no little expense. I did drop a hint to management about how long people stuck around that notorious dump, Nigeria when we were paid lots of nice, crisp pound notes but that is such an obvious idea that it went ignored. They will probably raise expenses to $35 per day, see if that does the trick.