tr courses cityjet
Hi Pilot 787,
I heard the other day that they are planning two type rating courses for the Avro very soon but they will fill them with the cadets. No figures mentioned.
They are quite short of FO's but their method of dealing with it is to call people on their day off to see if they'll do the flight. We'll call 10 muppets and one muppet will say yes, that's the attitude.150 euros for working on a day off is better than paying another salary.
They came up with a voluntary redundancy package about 7-8 months ago saying we were totally overstaffed and that this number and that number of pilots had to go. They even produced some interesting figures for each base. If they didn't get enough volunteers then they would have to chop some heads. There was a good take up of the voluntary redundancy from the skippers. Job done as far as the management were concerned. They got rid of the skippers on the higher pay grades and immediately started upgrade courses for new skippers to be based in Edinburgh. The new skippers are of course on a lot less at the bottom grade of the payscale.
Pay freeze and grade freeze in effect now for almost 4 years and no sign of it lifting.
Four guys came across from the Fokker 50 VLM fleet a couple of months ago. They are just finishing up line training.A lot of FO's went to Emirates. Up to September 2012 I lost count. Mostly it was the Dublin guys. More are waiting to go to Emirates. They have passed the selection but they need a start date.In the past few months Emirates have slowed down their intake but it should pick up again soon. A few skippers are said to be going to Ryanair soon and another four guys on an upgrade course in Dublin at the moment.
To sum it up, cityjet's planning to keep the seats filled is totally screwed up. It has always been like that and it always will be. Management here are not the sharpest tools in the drawer.
I hope you get a call but don't be pinning any hopes on these guys. Its totally random.