Star Air has a non-disclosure clause in their contract. Nobody knows the legal extend of this clause so the the policy adopted by the employees is: no infos to the public on internal matters whatsoever.
Some infos has escape over the years:
It is 99.9% night freight. Good reputation for maintaining their planes to a high standard and claims to be the best on-time performer of all UPS subcontractors. That could be true as they gott a 10 year contract with UPS covering 11 pieces of 767s back in 2005 .
Routes are in and out of the UPS hub in CGN and only to points in Europe.
Schedule-wise a week starts Monday (0001 UTC!) and is mostly 1 day (24 hrs) on, then 1 day off because of flight time limitations (but still a working day), then 1 day on, 1 day off, then 1 day on - alternating with a week of flying Tuesday + Thursday with some stand-bys thrown in. Subpart Q will probably be changing that picture slightly on some routes.
Schedules are basically 5+2 modified to accommodate a total of 150 off-days/year (incl. 5 weeks holiday).
No flying Saturdays and Sundays.
Every 25th day they have 4 consecutive days off, if they fall on workdays they will often fill the week with one of your "loose" off-days - now and then you end up with 7-9 days off in a row.
You will need some kind of housing arrangement while in CGN as you are required to show up 45 minutes after being called - hotels become impossible to get and extremely expensive during the frequent "Köln Messe" expositions.
Commuting was straight forward with ID on most carriers until October -05 when Star Air was separated from Maersk Air which was sold to a third party = no ID-tickets to Star Air employees.
The termination of Maersk Air caused large changes within Star Air as a lot of maintenance and administrative functions used to be done in Maersk Air. Star Air will continue as an independent Maersk company.
Pay is sort of high-end industry standard + 12% retirement + LoL of 10 years on 50% of gross salary. Tax is in Denmark - no way around it.
Most pilots hired for the past 10 years are civilian trained - nowadays with JAA CPL+ME I/R and 1000+ hrs total.
Promotions is on seniority.
Star Air top management was known for an unpleasant attitude and outright rude behavior towards crews. Result is 100% unionization. However, new CEO from June 2008.....
Because of the Maersk Line connection [huge Danish shipping and oil conglomerate] people tend to think that this could develop into a wold-wide operation. Reality is that they have been doing nothing but the UPS contract for the past 15 years. That means a very static situation until 2015 if they don't change the UPS contract before.
www.ppjn.com is normally up-to-date on Star Air stuff.