Originally Posted by About lilflyboy262...2
There is a point that you made Montrealguy, that I would like to discuss with you.
Are you saying that they should not be wet leasing aircraft for sunwing?
I am not certain I understand your question.
Sunwing mostly dry-leases aircraft from Europe. These are re-registered in Canada while they are operated by Sunwing under the Sunwing Certificate. Foreign pilots who come to fly these aircraft need to have their foreign licences validated by Transport Canada and they need temporary work visas from Immigration Canada. The dry leased aircraft are flown by both the temporary foreign crews and by the regular Canadian pilots Sunwing employs full time.
Sunwing also Wet-Leases aircraft from Europe, to a lessor degree. These aircraft maintain their foreign registration while flying for Sunwing. They are flown exclusively by the pilots employed by the airline which leased the aircraft to Sunwing.
In the summer, Sunwing also Wet-Leases some of its aircraft to Europe. These are operated in Europe, under the Canadian Registration and are flown exclusively by Canadian Sunwing pilots. Those pilots do not need European Visas, nor do they need European Licence Vallidations. In addition to those pilots who go fly the Sunwing Wet-Leased aircraft in Europe, Sunwing has sent additional pilots who go fly to Europe for European airlines, under European Operating Certificates. Those pilots need European Work Visas and European Licence Validations.
What I was stating is that under the Immigration reciprocal agreement where x number of foreign pilots are allowed to work in Canada in exchange the same number of Canadian pilots working in Europe, it only concerns those Foreign and Canadian pilots requiring Work Visas and Licence Validations. If Sunwing brings in 50 foreign pilots to work Canadian Registered aircraft with Canadian work visas, it cannot count as reciprocal pilots those Canadian pilots who go work in Europe at the controls of Wet-Leased Sunwing aircraft and who do not require European visas.
Pilots of wet-leased aircraft are one thing, those requiring Visas are another and the two groups cannot be mixed.
If the Wet-leased pilots sent to Europe by Sunwing are to be counted in the reciprocal agreement, then all foreign pilots who come to work for Sunwing under Wet-Leases (like the 767 crews in the summer) should also count.
As far as pilot standards, we know they vary from one country to another. Theoretically, pilots from all ICAO-member countries conform to Annex 1, which is sufficient to be allowed to fly an aircraft wet-leased to a Canadian airline, but we all know that in practice, this is not true. There were recent reports of hundreds of Indian pilots paying bribes to obtain their pilots licences and another news report indicated that and investigation follwing the crash of an Emb-190 in China had revealed that over 200 pilots working with that Chinese airline had falsified their logbooks with bogus hours in order to land their jobs. Same goes for Aircraft certification. I recently heard of an African Registered L-1011 that was doing charters in Iraq a few years ago. It's paperwork indicated it had been modified for operating at a higher gross weight. When Inspected by a colleague of mine who was a very experienced L-1011 mechanic and flight engineer, he quickly noticed that the modification had been done on paper only. The aircraft flew at high gross weight with the engines for the lower gross weight aircraft, totally illegally. The crews were European and this aircraft did charters to and from Europe......
The problem with wet-leasing is that you take the airline you wet-lease at face value and that your Ministry of Transport has no oversight over the foreign carrier.
That seven Czech Travel Service pilots that did not pass the Canadian Simulator PPC should have rung out alarm bells at Transport Canada, especially when Sunwing turned around and Wet-Leased an aircraft from that same company. But it did not. What they did was perfectly legal and Transport Canada had no business overseeing the pilots who were at the controls of the Wet-Leased aircraft, just like they would have no business checking that the High Gross L-1011 had the wrong engines, had that aircraft been wet-leased in Canada. That would have been for the Civil Aviation authorities of the African Nation where it was registered to check.......