British Airways DEP Selection - THE lowdown Part 1

[katanapilot]

JAARRG:

Jelly Doughnut has posted a pretty accurate, and IMO helpful, post to answer your questions, couple of further points:

Rostering at LGW uses the 'Carmen' system and has been said, can be better than BidLine (LHR fleets) if you are junior. That said, at LHR, a 'blind line', ie allocated line of work, will give you preferences that Pre-Ops do try and accomodate. Whether the result is good or bad all depends on what you are used to in your current employer I suppose! Once you reach about 80% seniority, you will probably start to get 'trip lines' and get some proper control over your roster. Bidline is also completely transparent. Don't know much about Carmen/LGW though.

as JD says, seniority is everything in BA, think long and hard before turning down a start date. God forbid, if you are in the hold pool and another event on the scale of 9/11 happened, you won't be starting any time soon and BA will, if/when they open recruitment again, require you to do the entire selection process again. Like the poor cadets who were supposed to fly out to Michigan on 12th September 01. Additionally, in the current climate, with talk of aircraft being stood down, recruitment is likely to slow up.

The good news: 747 fleet is desparately short of F/Os at the moment, I would be very surprised if, they didn't offer you the 747 based on the minimum requirements of ~2000hrs TT and 1000 Jet. Need 95 bums on seats this training year and so far not enough qualified DEPs to fill them.

Finally, yes the 'engagement' freeze is a nominal 5 years, but what it actually means is that BA can do what they want with you in that time. Sure you can bid to move (in BA if you don't bid, you don't get!!) but will only get approval if there is a vacancy that they can't fill with an internal guy or DEP. But, if the company force you to change fleets, you only get a 1 year freeze on that new fleet, so it's not all bad.

So, my opinion would be take the LGW Airbus if that's all they offer, ride it out for a couple of years and then see how you stand. By that time you will have got a decent seniority in the fleet whereas on the 744 and to a lesser extent the 777, you will be sat at the bottom for a long time, as internal guys come across above you.

Hope that's of some help to you, well done on getting into the hold pool. For LH-qualified people, I gather it's virtually empty. No idea about SH though.