Quote:
EK's network is far more challenging
Can anyone explain why it's far more challenging or demanding?
Fairly easy to answer that one Woofer. EK has one of the most (if not the most) diverse route structures in the world. We fly to every continent, operate in the most extreme weather conditions from -40 in Moscow to 50C in our own home base. Monsoons to blizzards.
We operate to many of the busiest, most sophisticated airfields in the world, right through to some of the most remote with very limited facilities.
Some of our destinations are war-zones in all but name.
We operate to airfields up to 7,800ft AMSL, in the middle of summer, with CBs all around, at night.
We need to be NATS qualified, ETOPS (no big deal there!) Northern Himalayas, RNP (AR), and various different route and Cat C airfield qualifications.
And finally, each and every 777 and 330/340 pilot needs to be able to turn up for work and fly his aircraft type, at short notice, to just about every airport on our network (about 110+ of them), regardless of whether anyone in the crew has ever been there before. (I mention this because I recall a few years back a QF exec bemoaning the fact that if they wanted to change an aircraft type on a sector, they had to "negotiate" with 17 different unions).
So, it is indeed a challenging and diverse job. You simply can't maintain a comfortable degree of corporate knowledge about all these destination, so you're always working hard to stay safe going into these different airfields.