SAT_BOSS
5th Oct 2007, 17:51
Yours truly is now ready to “gooi” another “klip in die bos” after my “klippies & coke” into an industry that I know quite well.
Many of us older contract dogs will remember the Rossair days and end saga’s fondly and some sadly. During my time at this company I actually managed to make a bit of money because the rand dollar was then in my favor and I reached a stage of my life where my family became a lot more important to me than “braaivleis rugby and Chevrolet!” in sunny South Africa and we migrated to Canada.
Initially I did some work for Rossair from Canada and then after their collapse I worked for different Organizations that does Contract Flying, two were Canadian Companies and also some South African ones. Thus I have been around the patch and have seen the movie in the world’s nice places that Lonely Planet says do not exist.
For a start there are four elements in this contract game and they are the actual Flight Operations Department and those are the guys that pole the aeries through the skies. Then you have the Engineers and without good ones you can just as well close the shop before you even start because they are the ones that keep the aircraft serviceable. Then you got the “Main Office” in Johburg that are the Back Up staff, they make sure you have a ticket to come and go, and actually arrive on the date required and leave on the day your contract is over. And the last main peanut in the packet are the clients or aka WFP, the so called World Food Program a UN side kick with an empire in Rome.
So let us deal with the dynamics of who actually makes the money for the contract company and those are the qualified guys that have a thing in their pockets called a license and a logbook that shows enough experience. Very few Contract Dogs are prima Donnas. Most Contract Dogs are professionals that get on with the job of fixing the aerie or actually flying it under very trying circumstances. Without “those people that earn good money” for living like H:mad:ts in the bush, eat ****, get Malaria, put up with idiot WFP “aviation emperors” and then still have a 14 year old kid shove an AK up your nose before a breakfast of bully beef and cold coffee are the ones that actually ensure that the bosses back home have a nice car to drive and the backup staff have jobs in air-conditioned offices.
But for this to happen the backup staff in the offices have no idea how to run or manage a contract or an aviation crew roster for two very simple reasons. They are staffed by people that have no concept of the field as a bigger picture and they think on behalf of you that flying you in and out on time is not of importance to you. Normally they have a cheapskate accountant that was a failure in most industries in the first place and he holds the purse strings and cut corners with aircraft parts and crew salaries. By doing this you end off with an aircraft in the field that has two “O” rings that are the “parts inventory” and field crew that are screwed around because salaries “that sound oh so big” can be hived off by letting crew that have planned time off with family stay longer with no notifications!
The next horror in the saga is that each given contract is wholly understaffed so you cannot effectively manage a crew roster & with the pilots and engineers that you have. The fact that “there aren’t any guys” actually translates to a thing called “supply and demand”. The short term solution to this is that the so called Chief Pilot that stays in the office and the Chief Engineer that start making promises to the crew that cannot effectively be kept and the crew is rotated at very quick intervals all over the world. These promises range from a cushier posting to a command upgrade or a rating. This has the knock on effect that the contract that you initially have to staff is still wholly underfunded with lack of crew, parts and resources. This has a continued knock on effect that keeps going around in circles.
The only way to really run a contract is ask two questions. The first one is what is the aircraft that you are placing on contract worth, and secondly what is the contract income realization out of this contract worth to the company? Once you have these answers you see very quickly that in sheer terms of money you are in the same league as road builders and construction crews that have a specific set method of standards and we can take something from their book and that is:
1. You are hired at a market related salary for the conditions you will be deployed to fly a specific make of aircraft in a specific capacity for the term of that contract.
2. You have the crew to back up the above when they go on R&R.
3. You have the engineer and his back up in place.
4. You have ENOUGH parts with the aircraft to be deployed or you make darn sure you can get them on the contract if something goes wrong under the terms to which YOU agreed to supply an aircraft.
5. You make sure the crew is sufficient to fulfill the FDP requirements of the client and you make sure that if needed more flying can be done because in simple terms more flying means more hours and after 20 years I know that WFP is incapable of making any rational decision based on experience because there staff is generally unemployable in any other industry on earth so they are by default generally idiots that used to fly for a piss pot country’s air force and knows dangerously to much about flying and to little about management. Capacity does not mean more aircraft necessarily; it means more crew to fly the one aircraft you have on that contract to ensure that no FDP stoppages occur.
6. You don’t get a 22 – year old Gofer to run the field base because he is fundamentally not trained to manage a ground operation that involves several million dollars; he is a trained pilot and not a paper shuffler.
7. You make sure that the crew roster is pre planned for a year so you can get good deals on airlines to fly crew in and out on time and you do not deviate from that and low and behold you will find that pilots are actually people and all people have one desire they want to plan their lives! Thus they can do by knowing how long and for how much they will work in what capacity and actually also do little things for themselves to make life more bearable while on contract.
8. Now all you have to do is look at the Zimex stability and how they pay and treat all their field based crews and maybe a thing called “wow” will happen in your planning schedules!
If only this is done you might actually run a successful enough contract that will be renewed in your favor. But for stability you must realize that greed will break you and that a slower and paced growth will increase your fleet and staff capacity and stability over the long term. It might mean that WFP will have to go back to the drawing board and decide if they really want safe operators and operations then they should actually pay for it and not get it on the backs of the field crews that are busting their asses day in and day out. Sadly as no South African Contractor will actually tell WFP to go and f:mad:ck themselves and pay so much per hour for an operation they will keep on shafting the field crews and show very little real if any stable long term growth.
Today we see a very interesting thing happening and my crystal ball tells me that in about 18 months time the existing South African Field crews will be swallowed up by the bigger airlines as the industry is on the move, leaving hundreds of youngsters with 400 hours on piston pounders that do not meet the WFP requirements on the ground. Once this happen the industry will grind to a halt and for this collapse to be avoided contract companies must now band together and ensure that WFP pays enough money so that everyone can be well funded, including the aircraft and the staff. Your staff is the only real long term effective asset that could give you stable and long term growth. Everything else can be replaced, but good staff that you lose is lost forever.
Many of us older contract dogs will remember the Rossair days and end saga’s fondly and some sadly. During my time at this company I actually managed to make a bit of money because the rand dollar was then in my favor and I reached a stage of my life where my family became a lot more important to me than “braaivleis rugby and Chevrolet!” in sunny South Africa and we migrated to Canada.
Initially I did some work for Rossair from Canada and then after their collapse I worked for different Organizations that does Contract Flying, two were Canadian Companies and also some South African ones. Thus I have been around the patch and have seen the movie in the world’s nice places that Lonely Planet says do not exist.
For a start there are four elements in this contract game and they are the actual Flight Operations Department and those are the guys that pole the aeries through the skies. Then you have the Engineers and without good ones you can just as well close the shop before you even start because they are the ones that keep the aircraft serviceable. Then you got the “Main Office” in Johburg that are the Back Up staff, they make sure you have a ticket to come and go, and actually arrive on the date required and leave on the day your contract is over. And the last main peanut in the packet are the clients or aka WFP, the so called World Food Program a UN side kick with an empire in Rome.
So let us deal with the dynamics of who actually makes the money for the contract company and those are the qualified guys that have a thing in their pockets called a license and a logbook that shows enough experience. Very few Contract Dogs are prima Donnas. Most Contract Dogs are professionals that get on with the job of fixing the aerie or actually flying it under very trying circumstances. Without “those people that earn good money” for living like H:mad:ts in the bush, eat ****, get Malaria, put up with idiot WFP “aviation emperors” and then still have a 14 year old kid shove an AK up your nose before a breakfast of bully beef and cold coffee are the ones that actually ensure that the bosses back home have a nice car to drive and the backup staff have jobs in air-conditioned offices.
But for this to happen the backup staff in the offices have no idea how to run or manage a contract or an aviation crew roster for two very simple reasons. They are staffed by people that have no concept of the field as a bigger picture and they think on behalf of you that flying you in and out on time is not of importance to you. Normally they have a cheapskate accountant that was a failure in most industries in the first place and he holds the purse strings and cut corners with aircraft parts and crew salaries. By doing this you end off with an aircraft in the field that has two “O” rings that are the “parts inventory” and field crew that are screwed around because salaries “that sound oh so big” can be hived off by letting crew that have planned time off with family stay longer with no notifications!
The next horror in the saga is that each given contract is wholly understaffed so you cannot effectively manage a crew roster & with the pilots and engineers that you have. The fact that “there aren’t any guys” actually translates to a thing called “supply and demand”. The short term solution to this is that the so called Chief Pilot that stays in the office and the Chief Engineer that start making promises to the crew that cannot effectively be kept and the crew is rotated at very quick intervals all over the world. These promises range from a cushier posting to a command upgrade or a rating. This has the knock on effect that the contract that you initially have to staff is still wholly underfunded with lack of crew, parts and resources. This has a continued knock on effect that keeps going around in circles.
The only way to really run a contract is ask two questions. The first one is what is the aircraft that you are placing on contract worth, and secondly what is the contract income realization out of this contract worth to the company? Once you have these answers you see very quickly that in sheer terms of money you are in the same league as road builders and construction crews that have a specific set method of standards and we can take something from their book and that is:
1. You are hired at a market related salary for the conditions you will be deployed to fly a specific make of aircraft in a specific capacity for the term of that contract.
2. You have the crew to back up the above when they go on R&R.
3. You have the engineer and his back up in place.
4. You have ENOUGH parts with the aircraft to be deployed or you make darn sure you can get them on the contract if something goes wrong under the terms to which YOU agreed to supply an aircraft.
5. You make sure the crew is sufficient to fulfill the FDP requirements of the client and you make sure that if needed more flying can be done because in simple terms more flying means more hours and after 20 years I know that WFP is incapable of making any rational decision based on experience because there staff is generally unemployable in any other industry on earth so they are by default generally idiots that used to fly for a piss pot country’s air force and knows dangerously to much about flying and to little about management. Capacity does not mean more aircraft necessarily; it means more crew to fly the one aircraft you have on that contract to ensure that no FDP stoppages occur.
6. You don’t get a 22 – year old Gofer to run the field base because he is fundamentally not trained to manage a ground operation that involves several million dollars; he is a trained pilot and not a paper shuffler.
7. You make sure that the crew roster is pre planned for a year so you can get good deals on airlines to fly crew in and out on time and you do not deviate from that and low and behold you will find that pilots are actually people and all people have one desire they want to plan their lives! Thus they can do by knowing how long and for how much they will work in what capacity and actually also do little things for themselves to make life more bearable while on contract.
8. Now all you have to do is look at the Zimex stability and how they pay and treat all their field based crews and maybe a thing called “wow” will happen in your planning schedules!
If only this is done you might actually run a successful enough contract that will be renewed in your favor. But for stability you must realize that greed will break you and that a slower and paced growth will increase your fleet and staff capacity and stability over the long term. It might mean that WFP will have to go back to the drawing board and decide if they really want safe operators and operations then they should actually pay for it and not get it on the backs of the field crews that are busting their asses day in and day out. Sadly as no South African Contractor will actually tell WFP to go and f:mad:ck themselves and pay so much per hour for an operation they will keep on shafting the field crews and show very little real if any stable long term growth.
Today we see a very interesting thing happening and my crystal ball tells me that in about 18 months time the existing South African Field crews will be swallowed up by the bigger airlines as the industry is on the move, leaving hundreds of youngsters with 400 hours on piston pounders that do not meet the WFP requirements on the ground. Once this happen the industry will grind to a halt and for this collapse to be avoided contract companies must now band together and ensure that WFP pays enough money so that everyone can be well funded, including the aircraft and the staff. Your staff is the only real long term effective asset that could give you stable and long term growth. Everything else can be replaced, but good staff that you lose is lost forever.