QF/Finnair A330 Wetlease
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Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce fronted a press conference on Friday to turn the first sod on a new pilot training centre in Sydney’s St Peters opening early next year. While Qantas and Jetstar pilots will be trained there, the centre will be operated by Canadian training company CAE, which will also own the simulators.
It is easily forgotten that construction was underway on Qantas’ new $165 million flight training centre adjacent to its Mascot headquarters after the existing, company-owned centre was compulsorily acquired by the NSW government for the Sydney Gateway road project.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”. Jean Chung In 2020, when COVID hit, Joyce halted construction, wrote off the sunk costs and sold the land for $100 million. Qantas spent many millions relocating its flight sims interstate and since then, the company has been sending its Sydney-based pilots, at great expense, to train in Melbourne.
The timing of Joyce’s pilot training announcement was, in trademark Qantas fashion, too smart by half. It was so nakedly designed to compensate for the anticipated anger of his pilots at Joyce’s other news that day: that Qantas will bolster its international network by wet leasing – which means leasing a plane with a crew attached – two A330 aircraft from Finnair.
Qantas pilots (and cabin crew) are rightly outraged because Qantas has only just retired two of its own A330s from the passenger fleet and handed them to Qantas Freight.
“Those aircraft were domestic aircraft that were perfect for converting into freighters,” Joyce claimed on Friday.
This is yet another extraordinary statement by Joyce, in a budding oeuvre of them.
As he well knows, all Qantas A330s ply a mix of domestic and international routes. In the final month those two Qantas A330s flew as passenger aircraft, they operated to Auckland, Bali, Jakarta and Singapore.
Joyce is attempting to create a completely false distinction between so-called “domestic” A330s he’s erased and the Asian A330 routes he’s now sub-contracting to Finnair. Niko, Mikael and Johannes are preparing for their three-year working holiday in Bangkok while Alan is on Redbubble ordering gigantic empennage magnets printed with the Qantas livery.
The five-year Finnair deal converts to a dry lease – so operated by Qantas crew – for its second half. Either way, Joyce will be long gone.
“This doesn’t lose a single Australian job,” Joyce declared. “They are positive for the creation of jobs and anyone who says anything else is just completely wrong.”
Anyone who says bussing in pilots and flight attendants from offshore will cost Australian jobs is just plain wrong! Woah. There is a lot going on there, there really is. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”.
Who else wants to live in Alan’s world? He should Airbnb rooms in his house of cognitive distortion. In this magical palace, put on your enchanted spectacles and you, too, can inhabit a universe where anyone who says anything else is completely wrong.
“The other thing it does [is] it adds more capacity internationally,” Joyce continued. “We’re getting a lot of queries from customers, ‘When are airfares going to normalise?’, and these are the ways you normalise airfares. You get these aircraft and capacity back in the air so airfares start coming down.”
Here, Joyce is spritzing the weary passenger with a touch of refreshing cabin spray. I’m normalising situations for you. Airfares will come down now. I’m not just doing what a rational businessperson would do, trying to exploit voracious demand, I’m sliding down the optimisation curve, all for you. I’m leaving soon, dear customer, but not until you love me.
The patterns of Joyce’s approval-seeking are so consistent. Here he is, hoping we’ll taste a little bit of mint in our last bite of the **** sandwich, and we’ll all remember him as Joycey the great competition champion, the frequent flyer’s friend. It’s unreal.
Of course, the real issue here is not the number of Australian jobs forgone by dint of two planes crewed by Helsinki hardbodies. The real issue is why Qantas even needs them.
The real issue is Joyce’s premeditated dereliction of widebody fleet renewal. It is his cancellation of 40 firm Boeing 787s and eight A380s, both orders he inherited. It is Joyce’s failure to order any other widebody aircraft until last year, when he ordered 12 A350s that won’t start arriving until FY26, long after his final tranche of bonus shareshave vested.
Joyce and the Qantas board have not placed any order for the replacement of its 26 dog-tired A330 aircraft, the backbone of the Asia network, whose average age is now 16.5 years (six of them have already turned 20). Their failure to do so has created a looming capability gap. Even if Qantas makes an order this year, the first of any replacements will not arrive for several years.
Blind Freddy can see that these decisions by Joyce have cost thousands of Australian jobs and significantly reduced Qantas’ international capacity; and that he made almost all of them well before COVID.
The only real normalisation coming for Qantas is at the AGM in November, when they put Alan in his straitjacket and wheel him out of there. The planes will keep flying, just, but the mad hot takes will never be the same.
Alan Joyce’s Helsinki final act
Joe AstonColumnistMay 22, 2023 – 7.44pmSave
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Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce fronted a press conference on Friday to turn the first sod on a new pilot training centre in Sydney’s St Peters opening early next year. While Qantas and Jetstar pilots will be trained there, the centre will be operated by Canadian training company CAE, which will also own the simulators.
It is easily forgotten that construction was underway on Qantas’ new $165 million flight training centre adjacent to its Mascot headquarters after the existing, company-owned centre was compulsorily acquired by the NSW government for the Sydney Gateway road project.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”. Jean Chung In 2020, when COVID hit, Joyce halted construction, wrote off the sunk costs and sold the land for $100 million. Qantas spent many millions relocating its flight sims interstate and since then, the company has been sending its Sydney-based pilots, at great expense, to train in Melbourne.The timing of Joyce’s pilot training announcement was, in trademark Qantas fashion, too smart by half. It was so nakedly designed to compensate for the anticipated anger of his pilots at Joyce’s other news that day: that Qantas will bolster its international network by wet leasing – which means leasing a plane with a crew attached – two A330 aircraft from Finnair.
Qantas pilots (and cabin crew) are rightly outraged because Qantas has only just retired two of its own A330s from the passenger fleet and handed them to Qantas Freight.
“Those aircraft were domestic aircraft that were perfect for converting into freighters,” Joyce claimed on Friday.
This is yet another extraordinary statement by Joyce, in a budding oeuvre of them.
As he well knows, all Qantas A330s ply a mix of domestic and international routes. In the final month those two Qantas A330s flew as passenger aircraft, they operated to Auckland, Bali, Jakarta and Singapore.
Joyce is attempting to create a completely false distinction between so-called “domestic” A330s he’s erased and the Asian A330 routes he’s now sub-contracting to Finnair. Niko, Mikael and Johannes are preparing for their three-year working holiday in Bangkok while Alan is on Redbubble ordering gigantic empennage magnets printed with the Qantas livery.
The five-year Finnair deal converts to a dry lease – so operated by Qantas crew – for its second half. Either way, Joyce will be long gone.
“This doesn’t lose a single Australian job,” Joyce declared. “They are positive for the creation of jobs and anyone who says anything else is just completely wrong.”
Anyone who says bussing in pilots and flight attendants from offshore will cost Australian jobs is just plain wrong! Woah. There is a lot going on there, there really is. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”.
Who else wants to live in Alan’s world? He should Airbnb rooms in his house of cognitive distortion. In this magical palace, put on your enchanted spectacles and you, too, can inhabit a universe where anyone who says anything else is completely wrong.
“The other thing it does [is] it adds more capacity internationally,” Joyce continued. “We’re getting a lot of queries from customers, ‘When are airfares going to normalise?’, and these are the ways you normalise airfares. You get these aircraft and capacity back in the air so airfares start coming down.”
Here, Joyce is spritzing the weary passenger with a touch of refreshing cabin spray. I’m normalising situations for you. Airfares will come down now. I’m not just doing what a rational businessperson would do, trying to exploit voracious demand, I’m sliding down the optimisation curve, all for you. I’m leaving soon, dear customer, but not until you love me.
The patterns of Joyce’s approval-seeking are so consistent. Here he is, hoping we’ll taste a little bit of mint in our last bite of the **** sandwich, and we’ll all remember him as Joycey the great competition champion, the frequent flyer’s friend. It’s unreal.
Of course, the real issue here is not the number of Australian jobs forgone by dint of two planes crewed by Helsinki hardbodies. The real issue is why Qantas even needs them.
The real issue is Joyce’s premeditated dereliction of widebody fleet renewal. It is his cancellation of 40 firm Boeing 787s and eight A380s, both orders he inherited. It is Joyce’s failure to order any other widebody aircraft until last year, when he ordered 12 A350s that won’t start arriving until FY26, long after his final tranche of bonus shareshave vested.
Joyce and the Qantas board have not placed any order for the replacement of its 26 dog-tired A330 aircraft, the backbone of the Asia network, whose average age is now 16.5 years (six of them have already turned 20). Their failure to do so has created a looming capability gap. Even if Qantas makes an order this year, the first of any replacements will not arrive for several years.
Blind Freddy can see that these decisions by Joyce have cost thousands of Australian jobs and significantly reduced Qantas’ international capacity; and that he made almost all of them well before COVID.
The only real normalisation coming for Qantas is at the AGM in November, when they put Alan in his straitjacket and wheel him out of there. The planes will keep flying, just, but the mad hot takes will never be the same.
That said,why is he leasing 2 more 'domestic aircraft' to operate international services.
Oh of course,the 2 he is getting converted to freighters were different to every other 330 200 ever built🙄
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There is a stark difference between geting paid 'X' salary and actually earning it. That seems to be lost on some on this forum.
Feeding the chooks in crewrest on a 15 hour sector and not sitting in a control seat below FL200 vs doing 4 domestic sectors with 3 aircraft swaps is the difference between getting paid and earning.
Feeding the chooks in crewrest on a 15 hour sector and not sitting in a control seat below FL200 vs doing 4 domestic sectors with 3 aircraft swaps is the difference between getting paid and earning.
As one of those 4 sector worker bees I couldn’t agree more with you.
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Which SO’s do you consider are fairly paid? If you answer all then it would appear some are more ‘fairly’ paid than others.
The pool of money allocated to Qantas flight ops has long been disproportionately distributed between SH & LH. AIPA have never really been interested in levelling that curve, and as a fair chunk of flight ops are beneficiaries of that distribution I think it would be fair to say that those pilots haven’t been particularly interested either. Having said that, you can’t put a bowl of cream in front of a cat and kick it up the backside every time it takes a lick. There is a system in place that rewards……..some……… and if you are able to take advantage of that then good on you.
I don't consider any S/O's "hideously overpaid". Look at the going rate for Captains and F/O's worldwide. Notice any disparities between their Qantas counterparts?
Last edited by SevenTwentySeven; 23rd May 2023 at 01:46.
Aren't the Finnair A330s -300s?
Take the combined wages of a four-person crew from any other airline in the world and compare it to that of Qantas’. You’ll find that it is probably quite a lot less at QF.
The SOs aren’t paid enough considering they are required to know how to do the exact same job as the Skipper if the need ever presented itself.
Don’t fall into the trap of diminishing your colleagues worth simply because QF created a new rank to give the illusion that those pilots are worth less just to save a buck.
The SOs aren’t paid enough considering they are required to know how to do the exact same job as the Skipper if the need ever presented itself.
Don’t fall into the trap of diminishing your colleagues worth simply because QF created a new rank to give the illusion that those pilots are worth less just to save a buck.
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Fact of the matter is the SO pay rate is sufficient if they have enough applications to fill the roles.
SO’s at QF Air NZ are B scale FO’s because they can’t (under normal ops) takeoff or land… yet are trained and checked to the same standard as an FO. Unlike other carriers where SO’s are cadets who hold Cruise Relief Type Ratings which aren’t recognised outside their Airline.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
Last edited by ElZilcho; 23rd May 2023 at 08:38.
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SO’s at QF (and Air NZ) are B scale FO’s because they can’t (under normal ops) takeoff or land… yet are trained and checked to the same standard as an FO. Unlike other carriers where SO’s are cadets who hold Cruise Relief Type Ratings which aren’t recognised outside their Airline.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
standards and they do in fact only
hold cruise relief type ratings….
SO’s at QF (and Air NZ) are B scale FO’s because they can’t (under normal ops) takeoff or land… yet are trained and checked to the same standard as an FO. Unlike other carriers where SO’s are cadets who hold Cruise Relief Type Ratings which aren’t recognised outside their Airline.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
We have the same issues at Air NZ where, due to the nature of the job, SO’s can earn more than 320 FO’s while on a lower base, but that should be an argument to increase the SH FO rates not reduce the SO rates. Neither Airline is going to attract new hires with the same experience levels they usually enjoy if the starting position is LH SO earning minimum wage.
That’s a question for the Airlines hiring department, they set the minimums.
Few years ago Air NZ proposed an SO Cadetship where Pilots would be hired with 500hrs as an SO on minimum wage (thereabouts) to build hours before going to the regional fleets as an FO. Didn’t get very far.
Bottom line is, both QF and Air NZ vastly overstate their entry requirements for the SO position, but if that’s who they want to hire, the experience will cost them, if it’s needed or not.
Few years ago Air NZ proposed an SO Cadetship where Pilots would be hired with 500hrs as an SO on minimum wage (thereabouts) to build hours before going to the regional fleets as an FO. Didn’t get very far.
Bottom line is, both QF and Air NZ vastly overstate their entry requirements for the SO position, but if that’s who they want to hire, the experience will cost them, if it’s needed or not.
Will edit my previous post.
QF SO's are given a CR TR. Can operate out of left or right seat not below 20k.
The last hiring round they upped the minimum requirements to "multi-crew time preferred". I can only guess to try help funnel in the ex cathay etc pilots who were out of work mid covid when EOI opened. All I'll say is I am not aware of any males getting an interview who came from single-pilot operations...
The last hiring round they upped the minimum requirements to "multi-crew time preferred". I can only guess to try help funnel in the ex cathay etc pilots who were out of work mid covid when EOI opened. All I'll say is I am not aware of any males getting an interview who came from single-pilot operations...
I’m aware of several who did with no multi crew background. Next conspiracy?
That’s a question for the Airlines hiring department, they set the minimums.
Few years ago Air NZ proposed an SO Cadetship where Pilots would be hired with 500hrs as an SO on minimum wage (thereabouts) to build hours before going to the regional fleets as an FO. Didn’t get very far.
Bottom line is, both QF and Air NZ vastly overstate their entry requirements for the SO position, but if that’s who they want to hire, the experience will cost them, if it’s needed or not.
Few years ago Air NZ proposed an SO Cadetship where Pilots would be hired with 500hrs as an SO on minimum wage (thereabouts) to build hours before going to the regional fleets as an FO. Didn’t get very far.
Bottom line is, both QF and Air NZ vastly overstate their entry requirements for the SO position, but if that’s who they want to hire, the experience will cost them, if it’s needed or not.
My original Point being, if you're hiring experienced Pilots the salary needs to reflect that, even if they're "Only SO's"
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My original Point being, if you're hiring experienced Pilots the salary needs to reflect that, even if they're "Only SO's"