I am just curious why it is okay for some airline companies to use contract pilots, to pay less, and have multiple AOCs in various countries.
For example Thomas Cook has AOCs in the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Germany (branded as Condor). Their combined fleet is 94 aircraft. They also regularly use sub-contracted airlines who employ contract pilots which pay far worse than Norwegian. In the summer season 2016 they used Avion Express which employed pilots on short term contracts. All of the Thomas Cook AOCs have U.S. DOT Authority and have it with zero controversy. Why is that? Is it because they have less than 100 airplanes? Is that the magic number?
WOW Air also employs pilots on short term contracts and have used, and continue to use, sub-contracted airlines to operate some of their routes. Why has that not caused controversy? Is it because they are too small?
So why the past three years fighting with U.S. authorities? Perhaps it is because every other airline that uses multiple AOCs in multiple countries, sub-contracted employees, has lower pay rates, and is nearly the same size, have received the U.S. DOT authorisation with ZERO issues.
As for the EI regs and using Ireland to set up an AOC? Well it is not because they need it for access to the U.S. as Norway, and the NAS AOC are covered under the Open Skies Treaty (In case you haven't noticed Norwegian has been operating into the States for several years now - certainly they did not need the NAI certificate to do that). They also did not need it for the outsourced contracts, or for having a base in BKK, as that has also been done under the NAS AOC, which is based in Norway. So they did not need the NAI certificate for access to the States, and they did not need it for outsourcing contract employees, which have been the two main arguments ALPA has been using in their 'Deny NAI' campaign. So their must be another reason for setting up the NAI certificate. I wonder what that could be...