I am in total agreement with FRying & DooblerChina. This isn't about emotions nor even hysteria: this is about the continuing decline of value of the airline pilot & it is us, the pilots, who have ourselves to blame, simple as that. Looking from the outside it seems to me that Norwegian were over recruiting pilots as some kind of publicity stunt, demonstrating their over zealous expansion & broadcasting it to the world. They didn't give two hoots about the lives or even careers that they were messing with, never gave it a second thought.
I was a captain with Ryanair & I would continually hear the moaning & groaning from the 'cadets' about how crap life was at FR, low pay, lousy roster, nasty management, etc., etc. (And it was & still is.) They were all going to build their time & then leave & here I would ask the question, "where are you going to go to?" All of the airlines have continually lowered their Ts & Cs & there are now no places left that offer anything like the conditions that we all took for granted back in the eighties & nineties. Now, if those same people: the Ryanair, Jet2, NAS pilots told the likes of O'Leary, Meeson, Kjos, et al, to shove it & walked out, within a day all of our professional lives would improve.
Where are many of the Ryanair boys going? To Norwegian which offers some of the lowest pay in the industry: you won't find a lower salary for a 787 driver in the world. So now you have built up your wide body time on the 787, again, where will you go? All of the other carriers have seen that we are prepared to work for peanuts & will consequently lower their Ts & Cs, simple economics in a capitalist market place.
Until we, the pilots, stand up for ourselves, refuse the
that we are constantly fed, then we can expect, & as a group deserve, nothing more.
