...but nobody will care.
There are a IMHO three, well four really, key factors at play here;
1) the European and North American carriers won't care because they'll simply use this as leverage during upcoming CLA negotiations. Less for us and more bonuses for them, and we pilots are so dumb to believe that we have to play along with this in order 'to stay competitive.' It's a race to the bottom with no end in sight.
2a) two words; oil and gas! There are many despotic regimes in the Middle East (
supporting brutal terrorist groups like ISIS for example) but western governments don't dare criticize them out of fear that they'll close the oil/gas tap. To the contrary, when one of these old farts dies, they all fly over to 'pay their respects.'
2b) As a direct result from 2a, many ME carriers have tall order books in Toulouse and Seattle. Criticizing their business practices would require a joint effort from the EU and US, quite difficult to imagine in today's "beggar thy neighbor" economy. Just look at that clown out of DOH and see how he constantly is playing out one manufacturer against the other.
3) the authorities won't care at all. As we've seen in 2008 when the financial system almost collapsed, the responsible authorities had
no clue what was about to happen and how to prevent it, and only massive amounts of tax money could avert a systemic meltdown. Just like in the financial services' where safety nets have been dismantled one by one by politicians and 'authorities' in order to facilitate the greed by bank managers, the same has happened in aviation. Pay to fly schemes, students loaded up with debt, turning a blind eye on union mobbing and criminally negligent FTL's facilitated by "bought and paid for experts" who have never seen the inside of a cockpit, all have one goal: satisfy the short term greed of airline managers.
The major difference between the banking industry and aviation? If one single bank collapses it might bring down the whole house of cards, but a single crash in aviation can quickly be blamed on "pilot error" and the charade can continue. Then of course there is always that 'get out of jail free card' that authorities and airline managers have cleverly put in every OM-A: "in the interest of safety, the commander is allowed to deviate....bla bla bla..." If anything happens then they'll quickly turn the tables and say: "well, why didn't they call in fatigued?" leaving the ignorant public further in the illusion that we are all overpaid, only work half of the time, have fantastic layovers with gorgeous cabin crew and that we can even call in sick/unfit if we've had a bad night's sleep.
As Jean-Claude Juncker said:
"We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it." Well, the same goes for us pilots. We all know what to do, but we won't be employed for long if we do it.
