Met an old mate set to leave at the end of the month after over a decade in kimchiland...the happiest bloke around and with the widest grin in town. The blatant erosion of T & Cs by the intransigent management over the years have made this gig utterly insufferable.
Incompetent f/o's who can hardly understand simple instructions in English beyond what is scripted. Constant misunderstanding of ATC clearances and instructions requiring incessant cross checks, re verifications and reconfirmations in crowded frquencies.
Pilots dozing off without telling you that they needed controlled rests. F/o selecting gear up at initiation of flare maneuver now kept tightly wrapped up.
F/o s dead scared to make changes to " scripted " PAs because should they make a small mistake and a passenger complains, this " misadventure " goes into their files and the command upgrades will be deferred! You will finf F/Os practising PA's aloud in the cockpit ( to the detriment of cockpit monitoring ) several times just prior to making even a scripted PA from the announcement book! The Chairman had struck such fear in utterly unimportant issues in PA! You can imagine the stress and fear the pilots harbour in more important matters.
Your professional skills are gradually eroded as you need to keep monitoring these pathetic chaps every minute you fly with them. Of course there are some competent ones, far in between!
Ground staff at crew service plazas and ticketing counters treating pilots
as if they are their enemies, utterly hostile at times and treating their own incompetence as your fault.
It's true that you will have people singing praises for KAL due to a few recent upgrades for foreign pilots from lower fleets up to the bigger shiny jets. Mind you, all is hunky dory until one fine day, you fall foul of their system. You may not even know why. Any Kim, Park or Lee amongst their employees can put in a confidential report against you with you being none the wiser. A simple mistake or oversight on your part will be treated as a great catastrophe by them so that they can humiliate you or put you in your place. Of course, there were chaps who grovelled and licked arses to get off, but they certainly lost their souls.
It always seems silly when you have ignoramuses coming onboard to simg praises for the much vaunted " commuting contract ". Once those Chinese airlines and pilot agencies can get their acts together, the exodus will begin. As of now many good local Korean pilots are leaving in droves. What's left are the utterly lost causes of pilots who swagger as Kijangnims! Maybe nincompoops will be a better title than kijangnims!
