NEDUDE said
'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?'
Firstly, the German, UK, Scandi and Belgium AOC airlines are all long established as independent entities and despite efforts at integration, still operate as such. There are some t&c differences, but largely a TC pilot is well looked after.
What is not OK and causes much concern among the tc workforce, is the increased use of 3rd. party operators, such as SmartLynx, Avion Ex and Air Tanker. Expansion of this type of operation is resisted by BALPA, sometimes with success, sometimes less so.
However, since the 3rd party penetration into our company has been resisted, we have been able increase our own workforce and increase command oppotunities for people on proper contracts with good t&c's.
It's always going to be a fight though, because I'm sure that our management look enviously over to the likes of Norwegian and wish they could treat us the same way.