Astraeus A320 Contracts

[sweetie76]

midnight cruiser

At the very least, their willingness to work after 55/60/65 for often little more than beer money is instrumental in dragging down the market rate, not to mention clogging up the promotion structure for people who are working their way up in the normal way, where the lower rungs are considerably less comfortable than they encountered as SFOs in BA.


My, my. A little bit of thread creep, methinks.

Midnight cruiser, I'm not sure where you work but permit me to tell you, as a Captain well into his 60s and earning the going rate, I don't feel I'm instrumental in dragging-down the market rate. If anything, I'm living proof that there is life beyond 55/60 and that the salary scales don't suddenly fall off a cliff at what was considered to be normal retirement age. We also have a number of ex-Big Airlines Captains working beyond age 60 very happy to take the going rate every month. The last thing these pilots would want to do is denigrate those of us who are "working their way up in the normal way".

I have spent many years in and out of various recessions/pilot surpluses/redundancies/overdrafts etc trying to gain a foothold on the bottom rung of a decent, seniority-structured airline. And even when I managed it, events sometimes conspired to knock me off what I thought was a comfortable perch and I had to endure periods of unemployment/relegation to the RHS etc. I suspect my experiences reflect those of a large part of the pilot community of a certain generation. Believe me, I have no intention of working for anyone for little more than beer money.

Nothing much has changed over the years except that employers are getting cannier at taking advantage of aspiring pilots. Retired BA pilots or simply old ones, such as me, are not instrumental in the erosion of Ts and Cs over the years. That old soldier, market forces, is mainly to blame.

Plus ca change.

The stark reality is that the airline industry is like any other in that it suffers cyclically from the usual market forces/over-capacity/poor management/disasters, natural or man-made etc. We can't expect Ts and Cs to be a never-ending gravy train nor can we expect full employment all the time. I take your point regarding BA pilots but even those are not immune to market forces. What I will say about BA is they have, as far as I know, always had decent roster/lifestyle practices in place and we should, as an industry and a body of men and women, aspire to some of those practices rather that bleating about pay.

I'm afraid I can't join in the fashionable 'newbie bashing' of those who pay employers to gain type-ratings and even pay for Line Training. We should confine venting our bile on to those unscrupulous operators who choose to take advantage of these depressed times. And we should also take issue with our august CAA for allowing operators to behave in this manner. I wish these aspiring pilots all the best in their endeavours. I would do the same in their place, faced with the same choices.

Now, can we get back to Astreus A320 contracts? I hope there are still a few unemployed pilots who are willing to get off their high horse and apply for a job on a A320 at LGW.