For those of you considering Emirates
This thread is to those of you considering Emirates. I will tell you all of the things that EK fails to tell you in the interview process or on the website. I have been at EK in the neighborhood of a year and I left a pretty darn good company to come to the sand and deeply regret it. So there that is my disclosure. I will first tell you about EK then about DXB that you might not know.
Emirates has no work rules.
So that means when you do a MUS or a DOH turnaround you only get 1:50 pay. We have no mim day like 5 hours so we turned up for work for less than two hours pay. With all the long haul flying we do the short turnarounds are getting in the minority but they are still there and when you get one it sucks! We do not get paid for layovers. So we can go on a 9 (yes 9) day trip and only get 36 hours pay or so. After a 9 day trip you should be done for the month but not at Emirates. We also have 3 day layovers in TPI and TUN and we only get 12 hours pay for a 4-5 day trip. On the other hand we have a 24 hour layover in IAH after flying 17:30 and that is exhausting.
Emirates has no Union
I know a lot of pilots don't like unions but most of those pilots are the ones that probably jumped a senority list somewhere. Emirates is in deperate need of a union. Work rules and changes are implemanted unilaterally with no feedback or diolouge from the company. In straight forward words the company does whatever they want and 9 out of 10 times it is not in the pilots best interests. I take that back I can't think of a time when any item was in the pilots interests. If any item gets in the company's way in the short term they get a waiver from the GCAA and any item that gets in the company's way long term they just change the rule. No research, no talking it over, no problem. It is gone. Out of our hair.
Pay
Pay is really bad here. I know a lot of pilots come from some pretty crappy companies so EK seems like paradise but if you compare apples to apples Emirates does not even come close to measuring up. For you hard heads that is a B777 Captain at another airline compared with an EK B777 Captain. That is why we don't have hardly any BA, CX, AA, LH pilots here. The package just does not compete.
You can't swith fleets unless there is an act of GOD or Allah. The company does whatever it wants whenever it wants. The pilots have no say.