HOMER:
Please don't talk to me about selection processes as if they were a hardship. You, just like everybody else, read up on what was required and you had every angle covered before you went in. You probably even bought yourself a leggo kit or Knex or whatever it is they use. You played the white man all along and you duped them into thinking that you were just the person you were looking for. You fawned and you won a scholarship for which you had to pay not a penny. THAT is possibly the only thing that comes close to a hardship. Had you not been so fortunate yourself on the one or two days it takes to complete the whole process I ask myself how many of you cadets would actually have had the mettle to find your own way of becoming pilots.
I won't bore all and sundry with the hardships that vocational pilots have had to go through or the potentially life threatening hardships that our boys in blue have had to go through as they are well documented but don't make me laugh, Homer.
You may well be a good pilot and a good operator but you know absolutely nothing about airlines or hardships; all you understand is seniority lists.
You don't understand, do you, the hypocrisy of our situation. We could have done all those routes far cheaper and far more efficiently than BA. Fine, we would be on a lower wage but we had a cool airline (with a crap rosterring system!) and all it's problems were being ironed out slowly. Eventually we would have had bigger aircraft just like GB. We didn't have to put up with stroppy dispatchers or get called into the office because we berated them for not doing their job properly. We didn't have ramp managers tell the tug drivers that they couldn't load a couple of pax' bags in the hold (so that we could make a slot!!!). We couldn't be seen to show up BA as we had been doing for years! We couldn't beat them so we had to join them. Fine, now they are doing to us precisely what they didn't want us to do to them: fly our routes with their aircraft and shove us aside quoting seniority (which, if anything, we should have had AT LEAST from Dec 2000 anyway).
If my attitude seems strange to you then it's because you are what I said you were; a Silver Spoon Pilot. I worked hard for four years to get my command (and longer if you count training and instructing) and I'm dammned if I'm going to lose it to a bunch of hypocrites without a fight and a rant.
I have been willing to accept my lot, Homer, don't get me wrong. If my fleet had not been touched, or if you people hadn't been trying to strip me of my hard-earned stripes to protect your own interests I'd be Mr Friendly. As it is, it's you or me and my name ain't Jesus.
Hand Solo:
150 jobs are not being lost, don't be so melodramatic. Acording to Lloydy baby there are more than enough places at LHR and LGW to fit us all in over the next three years; which is how long it will take them to crew 16 RJ's fully.
Also, your assertion that it is management and BA that are trying to stiff us is hogwash propaganda nonsense. In my case, if anything, and for what I'm 'fighting/bleeting/whingeing' -whatever - I've got management on my side because if they can, they'd rather I retain my command as they'll have to pay me as such anyway, so they may as well get their money's worth.
To all those who are advocating moderation, I appreciate where you're coming from. To a certain extent you are right. However, you have to appreciate that BA is too big and therefore it's individuals too selfish. It's making me so, but only because in order to survive, I fight fire with fire.
When the only words that ever come out of a BA pilot is seniority, seniority, seniority you become a little weary and there will never be understanding; they don't care about anything else.