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Luray
10th Oct 2019, 16:45
Hey there,

I was recently hired by national European carrier. I signed employment contract, received airport pass, id and the uniform. A few days before the type rating i received a call from the airline security chief and he told me that my sim is cancelled and i will be put on standby till further notice. I was able to find out what exactly is the issue with me and it sound really absurd. As a 3rd country national who spent few years flying in a 3rd country i am booked for a very strict security background check that involves intelligence service - and it is already taking like 2 month. The fun part is that this is not my first European airline and i was never involved in anything illegal which is proven by my criminal records.
Has anyone faced anything similar recently in EU? As i understand , if you have been working in a 3rd world country and there is no cooperation between intelligence agencies they will simply reject you - even though you haven't done anything illegal.

Denti
10th Oct 2019, 19:55
Security stuff is still mainly a national thing, not strictly EU. Yes, there are EU databases that will be used, but how exactly a background check will be done is quite different between countries. My german background check is painless, fill out a form, send it off, get the "all clear" a few weeks later, the check is not bound to a company, but simply a personal one. The UK one on the other hand was a major pain in the behind with a lot of questions asked, character and professional references, crime records i had to obtain instead of them simply using the EU databases and it took something like 3 months, concluding the process more than a month after i started to work and having obtain my badge which allows me airside access. And that is for an EU citizen that has always lived and worked in the EU. It probably will be much more difficult if there is a third country involved.

Luray
10th Oct 2019, 22:50
Security stuff is still mainly a national thing, not strictly EU. Yes, there are EU databases that will be used, but how exactly a background check will be done is quite different between countries. My german background check is painless, fill out a form, send it off, get the "all clear" a few weeks later, the check is not bound to a company, but simply a personal one. The UK one on the other hand was a major pain in the behind with a lot of questions asked, character and professional references, crime records i had to obtain instead of them simply using the EU databases and it took something like 3 months, concluding the process more than a month after i started to work and having obtain my badge which allows me airside access. And that is for an EU citizen that has always lived and worked in the EU. It probably will be much more difficult if there is a third country involved.

Thanks Denti,
Its weird that i already received company id and airport pass and only few weeks later they invited me for the security interview and then few weeks later cancelled my sim.
I hope this people from intelligence agencies are competent and have some dedicated channels of information exchange, otherwise no one will reply them and i will be screwed. Recently i read an article about few Danish pilots that were in the same situation after returning from 3rd world gig.