All that glitters is not Ottoman Gold
Murray,
I think it would be rather churlish of one to come on here and bemoan living in Istanbul and commenting on life in THY and the Ts & Cs if I hadn't been there and done it but for clarification yes for my sins I went there and did the THY pilot thing! (I'm not however sure how that wasn't clear!)
Moving on. Now you mention the comparison to FR and THY. The comparison I made was caveated by "if you are single" those 4 words are very very significant.
If you are single it doesn't matter if you only get 3 days back in UK/or wherever you call home per month. The assumption being that you would only go somewhere like Turkish as you cannot get a job elsewhere you are clearly going to go there to get the hours to move on to something like the Middle East et al.
With FR at least you would be somewhere in Europe so moving home was an easier thing and the option to move your family to live with you was also there. That was not really a possibility in Istanbul, you would be crazy to move your family there!
Is FR that bad? well it depends on if you think that you pay the airline more than the pax to be onboard is bad or not. Having already paid for your type rating, uniform, food, accommodation, security and ID cards for god's sake, the lanyard to put them on and have no contractual base and your choices for the day were with or without lubricant.
FR bases are mostly in Western Europe so I didn't have to contend with a massive cultural or climatic shock. Also everyone spoke English, as opposed to thinking that they could speak English which was a huge factor at THY where almost no one speaks English.
Though THY had many many bad things about it and the same for Istanbul there were of course good sides. The engineering was good, the flight support was excellent. You never had arguments with Ops has to how much fuel to take or not, whether to go or not go and basically as flight crew you were left to your professional judgement. If you said you weren't happy from an MEL perspective or any other then you didn't fly. That is not the case in the airlines I had flown in prior FR included. In those airlines the decision was made for you and you were told what to do or not do and if you didn't agree you got sacked, simple!
In sum though FR didn't treat the human capital very well, the training was thorough as were the procedures, it felt safe as a pilot to operate there and you may have been paid less than the local paperboy but you did not feel as if you were going to die from anything other than starvation. In THY you frequently would wonder if this was your last day on earth, scratch your head after yet another weekly TCAS or eGPWS aural call out and wonder who you had bothered in a previous life to end up having to work in a place like that. In fact it was often so scary being in THY that you yearned for the days where you went back to mosquito filled hotels working your way round the delights of Lagos, Sierra Leone, Dakar and other dream holiday locations which is what I had to do when I found myself looking for work a few years prior to that all.
Right now I'm FZ and expect to be so for the foreseeable. Do yourself a favour if you do not need to go to THY. Don't go, there are soo many other jobs now. It looked good from the outside but it wore thin pretty quickly. Granted you were more likely to get paid than being in Africa but not what you expect, or when you expect it. There is always some reason at THY why the pay is not quite as advertised. (Ah but you are training, ahhh but you LPC only on NG not on classic so you can only fly 66 of the fleet of 72 planes! So we will pay you less!!! ah but you have a degree but it is not certified by Turkish University so you will be paid as non graduate, etc etc)
There is enough info from myself and many of the chaps/chappesses I worked alongside in Thy to tell you the pros and cons but like I said if you are single then it is more of an option. If you have a family to support or need anything other than hours i.e paying etc then don't bother go somewhere else.
You have been warned!!