TangoUniform
With all due respect you are responding with some wrong info. The 210/hour that you probably found on airlinepilotcentral.com is trip pay converted to hourly pay. SWA pays you per trip. If you game the system (drop trips, pick up trips, grab premium pay, etc) it is very easy to go well north of 100 credit hours per month. I have several friends at SWA and captains can exceed 300,000USD per year and those who really work the system make over 350k when you include profit share. Those numbers are 91,750AED per month and 107,041AED per month respectively.
The whole corporate culture at SWA is to fly your as# off and get paid accordingly. They build most trips to have very high credit so you fly a lot, make a lot, and get at least half the month off. So yes some make more than senior BA training captains. As do many Fedex and UPS captains.
You mentioned taxes. Who pays 50% tax in the states?? Dubai is tax free right? Yet a crap beer costs $10USD in Dubai, vs 3.50 in the states. Clothes, electronics, cars, food, housing, virtually everything in the USA is cheaper than dubai. Significantly so. Gas and labor are the only things I can think of that are cheap in Dubai. Dubai doubles or triples the price of everything and calls itself tax free. You are just putting money in the pockets of a few select families.
As for sick pay. Generally the way sick pay works is you build up a sick bank over time. So if you have 270 hours of sick time and you break your leg then you line credit is deducted from your sick bank. If I bid 90 hour lines then I am good for 3 months of full pay. Then when that is exhausted I kick into long term disability which is usually 60-65% of my guarantee or in some airlines "average line value."
Last edited by Laker; 28th Apr 2011 at 08:50.