With the depreciating greenback, it's far cheaper for them to employ foreigners. For the locals their T&Cs involves lots of down time off days and extra classese like English proficiency, safety seminars, national service refreshers etc. Also, paying big $s for pilots' kids studying in prestigious Korean & foreign varsities. My korean F/Os tell me that the company also find their pilots from Jeju cadet school are rebellious, prone to staging strikes and sit outs. So KAL is contend to wait for the military to release pilots as these are very compliant to company demands. However the numbers from the military does not meet their requirements, so their stop gap measure.......foreign suckers coming in as f/os. Seems that these foreign f/os hope to be upgraded, after hearing of upgrades of foreign B737 skippers to the B744 two or three years ago.