777
Well it sounds like you'd already made your decision to be honest, and absolutely the best of luck to you with your next job, what/wherever it may be. If you only have a short time until upgrade in your current crowd, then ask this if you're really trying to decide whether to come over: will I end up as an unemployed skipper soon, or will I be a skipper in a company, country or town I don't want to be?
Not many people would come over with 2 years to go until command, there is obviously a reason you're thinking about it. As far as getting the quickest command you can get, instead of going where you want to be, my opinion on that has always been that if you end up looking for DEC jobs, where are you likely to be moving to? Here, I suspect. You may also have to go rather further west, as well, by which time I may well have a command here.
I have nothing more to say on the matter of why you should come over here and every word I posted I stand by, you well know the negatives as they are plastered all over this forum, however as I found when I arrived, there are many, many more pilots in Emirates who don't post here, have been around for more than ten years and intend to be here for another ten.
They have their families over here, their children were brought up here, and they (and this is an entirely different story) generally own their own homes, having taken advantage of the crash of 09-11. They don't post on PPRuNe and because you've never met them until you join, having only met the guys who have left and, therefore most likely, haven't got much positivity to spread. Someone told me I was trying to convince myself that I like it, well everyone else sounds exactly the opposite, they are convincing themselves that they hate it. Where is the consistency in that argument?
Don't get me wrong, Dubai has its downsides but there are lots of people who arrive over here who expect to live a life of unprecedented luxury, live in a 5 bed mansion, whose wife expects to just drink cocktails by the pool all day for the rest of her life and who expect to live in exactly the same way as they did back home otherwise, wherever it may have been, just with a bit of sun. They would be wrong about that assumption, again I will say that as far as expat places go, Dubai is up there so salaries and T&C's are dropping across industries, as increased demand makes recruitment easier (not necessarily the case for Dubai Airways at the moment).
But the people who have complained are generally the ones you find screaming at the uninterested desk people in the RTA/DEWA/Etisalat etc, who refuse to just roll their eyes, take a ticket and wait for the 400 people ahead of them to not be particularly well served. You go into these places twice to get stuff done, and you always will do. I've never tried it with kids though so I won't judge those who have.
But I have operated in and out of Milan, Rome etc many times with guys who scream and shout at the dispatcher to try and speed things up...does it work? I had one dispatcher just walk off the aeroplane and wouldn't come back until the skipper apologised. The guys I flew with who just smile, offer them a coffee and have a brief chat generally get away 20 minutes earlier. The same approach applies here. Although you will generally still have to go back...
Yes, as Alconguin Crusader said above, plenty things do cost more over here. What are you going to do about that? However I have to say that with EPC, things do change. A quick look at Chill Factore, Manchester's Indoor Ski Slope (with a 180m slope), says that an all day pass is £50 (about 300Dhs). All day access to Ski Dubai's 400m run is, with EPC, 250Dhs, or £41...there is balance, even for those not in EPC, an all day pass is 275Dhs. You also have more money to spend on things like that, which is the reason prices are higher.
I spent a good while when I arrived complaining about prices but after a while you look around and for many more things, it isn't as bad as a lot of people make out. A big part of the issue is that everyone here (including my wife and I) does more expensive things more often. Back home we went out once a month, here 3 or 4 would be more normal. We go to more events, we have a closer group of friends than one scattered throughout Europe and the time we spend with our family when they come over is more relaxed and more quality than a quick Sunday dinner before piling back home in time for school/work.
I am not a Ski Dubai rep by the way, but I'm not going to go all around Google in order to test cost hypotheses...
I'm not going to pay too much heed to the ridiculous 'you'll know you shouldn't have done it because we told you so'...as I said before, there are plenty of people out here who have exactly my point of view on the matter and they don't usually spend time on PPRuNe, unlike me who has nothing else to do for the next hour or so.
But again, if you don't really want to leave your home country, then don't come out here. It isn't a place to pine for home. Both of us (which is VITALLY important) wanted to leave home and try something new, I left my job at a brilliant national carrier, we have never been bothered about living next to our families, as much as we love them, and we saw it as an opportunity to experience something completely different...but you have to want something completely different in the first place.
Don't make your decision based on everyone here, but if you don't really want to leave your home airline/country/town (and it sounds like that may be the case), or if your wife wants to stay at home, then I would agree with the others, don't bother...but of course if that's the case, then why bother applying over here?
As a footnote, I saw today that Qantas is cutting 5000 jobs today and deferring orders as well. It's a real shame but that's the sort of stuff that is least likely to happen over here, at the end of the day, and when it does happen, it's unlikely to be any time soon. GF had 30 years...how long do you have before you retire?
Last edited by thehonourablefong; 27th Feb 2014 at 05:54.