cheers S.U.C,

yep, I was thinkin about that 50% thing last night.... prob a bit too much, it was all written in a hurry :O I was thinking about how to immediately make people question leaving. But poeple will still leave if they are then forced into slave labour for it.

I believe that a nice increase in salary or something to stop people just only looking to the exit. You need to give incentive for people to stop and consider the option. At the moment the majority of pilots (and other staff) are fed up with the aformentioned systemic problems, and pay is part of the problem, but yeah your right, lifestyle is another important one as well as the management attitudes/treatment of those under them; Which I bet sadly is passed on from the top down.
This means that using the famous PILOT decision making model staff conclude:

Pool the facts:
everything mentioned in these posts and more. Frustration, pay, lifestyle, opportunity, treatment etc etc

Identify the problem:
Management and CEO leadership then that filtering down to conditions for staff.

Look for a solution:
Better employer who understands value of staff. Or better paying/lifestyle job. OR better job with opportunities. Or all combined (they are out there!)

Operate solution:
Attriction rate explains this.

Take stock:
Most people leaving Rex are reporting WAY better conditions/lifestyle/pay/opportunities etc. This now encourages people to look elsewhere and exacerbates Rex's shortcomings.

Dont get me wrong, every employer usually has something that you will not agree with, but if other conditions balance it out then its tolerable/enjoyable still. Then, the proof will be in the attriction rates for the most part. Ego will not help in introspection on managments behalf to change these problems. Its time that Rex adjust to market competiveness for crew. Its simply saying, we will offer you better conditions and so people leave. Its as complex as you make it and it dont need to be that complicated.

They could open up some of the old NSW regional bases so people wouldn't have to live in Sydney. That might go some way to making up for the salary.

I'd quite happily give away my current gig to live on the NSW north/south coast.

Money
 

Just on the subject of money, it has of course been done to death previously, most notably by myself. The fact remains however that REX pilots are paid significantly less than their counterparts at Qlink, Skywest etc, to the tune of approx 20-30 precent! This has been the result of more than a decade of opportunism by this and previous management. Needless to say an instant redressing of this imbalance would place a significant burden on the company finances, and in light of the other issues, probably wouldn't have a large enough effect. Paying the pilots extra each fortnight won't do it. But, playing Devil's advocate, making it difficult for them to leave probably will!

Imagine you are a REX pilot and each and every year, you are paid (lump-sum/super salary sacrifice, or whatever) an equivalent to 40 percent of salary. The only catch, you have to serve the entire year to qualify. Leave after 364 days, and zip! So each and every year you can plan that family holiday, home renovation, new car, or deposit on a place of your own. Just try and save $30-40 K and see how long that takes, especially living in Sydney, and especially on an F/O's salary. Additionally, Jetstar come calling with a great deal. $30K for your endo, 6-8 weeks without an income, a base away from family and friends, and a workload even REX pilots would shudder at! As well the call comes just weeks before the annual REX payout. Suddenly the shiny jet doesn't look that shiny anymore.

It's not impossible. When all this happened before, finance did the costings for such a plan. Assuming a 100 percent retention, approx $6.25 to the cost of each ticket! At the time REX were levying nearly $50 per sector for fuel! A small price to pay for a reliable air service? Also pilots that still chose to leave, and forfieted their payment, would see that money being saved by the company. Win, win. People stay, company does not have to slash services, company makes more money. People leave, company pockets the dough! Management naturally rejected the plan, and they would argue that the company didn't fold, true, but ironically only because of a global financial crisis! But this time? Well, maybe something this radical may just need to be considered if it comes down to survival. Fact is of course it should have been done years ago. Now, it just maybe too late.

In any case, least it will have the benefit of never being tried! :E

Ha! Disappear from Pprune for a while and when I do get back, there's Rex with the same issues surfacing again. Got to love aviation in Australia. Does anyone in aviation have the forethought to think any further out than next week? The CASA continues to implement policies ostensibly to increase safety, but which effectively reduce the appeal of aviation as a hobby and career, and kill off traditional entry level openings through the massacre of GA owner operators and their market opportunities. Rex seems to be an effective partner in the crime.

Rex sets itself up as the new age entry level operator; tries to inhibit the possibility for crew to progress through to the next level of aviation and in doing so cuts its own throat when pilot demand exceeds supply. Does Rex even realise that it has very effectively established itself on the bottom rung of the ladder? Has Rex management discussed the fact that while Rex services might be attractive to customers, there is almost nothing worse in business than being unable to service customer demand?

Rex management (and the CASA) need to open their eyes. The cupboard is bare. The well is dry. Even if the pay structure changes now, they'll have to start looking at poaching from above. That gets expensive. There is very little coming from below.

A 20% payrise to the captains alone would put a 10 year captain above $115,000 base, not too bad compared to QLink and Skywest. Over 150 captains that would cost the company around $3,000,000 per year, when compared to annual profits averaging 20mil its a small price to pay to provide stability for the company to expand.
Throw in better rest times between min rest overnights (based on flt and duty over the previous duty) and a minumum 2 days off before and after 6 day shifts and most of the fatigue issues are covered (both can be acheived at no cost with better rostering practices).
Sweetners to make the package would be a sensible overtime limit of somewhere around 60-70 hrs per month with standard extention payments above and restrictions on tours away from home base to promote family lifestyle. Again these will cost little with proper staffing levels as most crew will average around 60-70 hrs and travel between bases or multiple overnights is not required in normal operation.

At the end of the day i think a lot of pilots have lost interest in long term employment and having to fight for scraps. The company has to make the first move on this front and make a serious offer as most dont care to waste time and negotiate when they can just leave for immediate gain.

I bet that management are kicking themselves over the last EBA when they agreed to pay per hour for RDO callouts?!

Because I am not married and live close to the airport the option to work on days off was always available and as a result I vary rarely said no to casual days. In all honesty the amount of the money I was recieving per week was frequently over $3500 per fornight after tax and my record was $6000 but I did work hard for it. It made me wonder... based on this, has the company done the sums and realised that its cheaper for to keep paying for RDO callouts than to simply employ more pilots / retain pilots? Has anyone done any sums on this?

I loved my time at REX but another big point of frustration was the charters that were conducted on behalf of PEL AIR. Whilst every charter I did in recent times was all on RDO callout money the sheer disorganised mess that we called an 'air service' really made one think "has anyone thought this through". For me another big point of frustration was the lack of support and the attitude of "we know the situation is stuffed but the crew will sort it out somehow so we won't bother fixing it!". The crew at REX very often bend over backwards to ensure that oversights, stuff up's and mistakes are resolved even if it had nothing to do with their job description eg, checking passengers in, weighing bags and refueling the SAAB's during charters when the info pack said that was supposed to have been taken care of for us... VERY GA! yet thats what my fellow crew were always willing to do... step up and help out. The very lack of even a "thanks guys/girls" from anyone up top really drove the pin straight through the hearts and minds of every REX pilot. Oh... and working 6 days straight, having 1 RDO then doing another 5 days straight only to be told "Oh, buts it legal so whats the problem?!" after calling in fatigued... didnt help either!! :=

Wish all you guys direct tracking, CAVOK and happy landings!

Sorry for poor spelling and punctuation in my previous post... the last glass of red was too good :ok:

Macrage why do you boast about how much money you made by working on days off and then you complain about the rostering practices at Rex 6 on 1 off 6 on 1 off etc :confused:

Stop drinking on a school night and get back to your bus study

So what's going down between Rex and AFAP down at Fair Work Australia tomorrow?

Is AFAP disputing the crewing anomalies that currently exist in practice against what's in the EA....

or was that a post to entice GA guys with $$$$ in their eyes and dreams of turbine time :-)

dont be fooled by the cash, you cant do casual days forever b4 you snap with fatigue or wishing you could have a life!

elaborate on the FWA/Rex thing? ..... My guess its about the f*$k over of Capt.Richards and some management and or owner doesnt wanna accept the court decisions???

Bus studies??

What are you referring too?
If your referring to ground school I haven't started yet. Are you referring to the guys that started at Jetstar this week? Might have me confused with someone else.

Firstly, to go back to the first page of posts, I was SOC'd due to the late Jepps and going to the sim when they were not available on the notices page. I'm told it happened to others too, but to avoid rumours, it happened to ME.

As others have said, it seems to be a long term attitude from Baxter Rd/Singapore that is the main problem. While JJ's suggestion of a 50% pay increase is unsustainable and unrealistic something significant needs to be done to show a change of attitude. I was at the "EBA meeting" with management and the chairman last time around where LKH said "in 5 years you'll be flying a jet" in response to F/O pay being equivalent to a secretary. They now need to change the attitude from "we expect you to leave and don't care when you do" to realising that they don't have enough people available to replace leaving captains, and so the brand will suffer with reduced services and cancelled flights.

I think the example of replacing Geneva with a program that is still terribly limited 9 months after its introduction shows the "we will just try to push through" attitude, rather than spending some money to perhaps get some more/better IT people to come in and make it happen so that ops and crewing can have a bit more help from the system.

Additionally, the fact that a meal break between flights it measured from off blocks to on blocks time seems ridiculous. They reject a claim if you are on the blocks for 3 mins longer than the required break, even though the engines have probably been running 5 mins by the time you taxi in Sydney. And yet they have beacons on figures somewhere to measure OTP don't they? Just another example.

While fixing the IT and paying any marginal meal claims won't stop people from leaving, it would give us something less to whinge about.

Ok, so solutions.

As S.U.C. noted. money is not the only reason people are leaving, but improving the money in some way would indicate a change of management attitude to indicate they want people to stay, at least for a little while, and would like us to enjoy our job too. I like Krusty's suggestion of a bonus to stay each year, maybe even offer a bonus for some significant milestones in the logbook so that experience seems to be valued (ok, that may result in every taxi taking twice as long on paper than in reality, but lets worry about the detail later). Additionally, while I like the 4 on 4 off proposal, I'm not sure it stacks up on paper as cost effective, but some sort of improvement in rostering/days off would set Rex apart from other operators and may be sufficiently enticing to keep people who don't just want more money.

Rex needs to provide potential captains with a reason they would apply to Rex instead of elsewhere.

While I only came to Rex at the end of the last "shortage" I think it would be fair to say that many GA guys, like myself, saw Rex as the place to get a quick command which would help career progression. As I see it now, there will be the same opportunity if Rex is to take more direct entry pilots who are upgradeable, but they now face the problem of possibly not having enough trainers to make this happen. (Maybe an increase in pay/conditions for C+T is needed to address this too?)


my 2 cents.
T.A.B.A.

Interesting you mentioned more money for Check and Trainers T.A.B.A. Last EBA the Check and Training staff were able to achieve increases to their additions to salary. As this forms part of the EBA, they were also entitled to the CPI increases enjoyed by all REX pilots. The Company (most notably LKH and JD thought differently. It took a court case and FWA to point out the bleeding obvious before the company would acknowledge their due. Even then the company has signalled that it may appeal! Is it any wonder that among the first pilots joining the exodus, are some of REX's most senior Check/Training, and management pilots. :eek:

It seems that REX continue to perfect into an art form the practice of pissing off the people it can least afford to. :rolleyes:

On face value this seems like a strange way to run a business. Is there a bigger game in play here? LKH is obviously no fool so why would it make it so damn difficult for the pilots? It would almost appear that he is trying to get rid of everyone. Does he flush out his airline, then go crying poor to the government and start importing pilots from China through his flying school? I'm not even sure that would be possible however it seems bizarre behaviour to be constantly at war with your employees in a small airline.

PPRUNE is full of conspiracy theories when it may all come down to just dollars and cents at the end of the day. Sure they could be evil management plotting against the nation and associated pilot bodies. Or they just be management who understand where in the scheme of things their business lies. :ugh: let's say for a moment that Rex offered an unparalleled lifestyle for pilots....big stretch of the imagination here...but let's just say they've created a wonderful regional family airline where everyone feels respected, adored and wanted. You know what? Pilots would still leave. The young-uns would leave with stars in their eyes about flying jets for a flag carrier, international would loom large for some of them, others would get bored and some would find more sun, lifestyle and a retirement home elsewhere. At the end of the day, it's a regional airline, flying small props around Australia, that will never be the career fulfillment for the vast majority of pilots who had other dreams when they paid $100k to train up. And maybe Rex management know this. Why try to gild the lily?

Krusty I must correct you JD didnt think anything, he was just doing as LKH said the same goes for his other boys CH NH they are all scared of him because they also know their jobs are on the line. The pressure they must be under, no wonder one of them looks like he is about to explode.

Lets remind ourselves who has left recently:
FOM x2
senior Check/Training x2
Training Captains x4
Captains x lost count
First Officers x5
Cadets x doesnt matter there are more where they came from

Rex will always be at the bottom of the pile with low pay, crap $10.99 uniforms a stupid C&t department run by the village idiots having to wait in line for a car park and then four months later have 2 TON come and ask you why you were 4 minutes late.

I dont think any sort of reasonable pay rise will keep crew. LKH is quite right as long as he and his loyal hench men are at the top pilots will leave for other turbo prop jobs, take pay cuts, quit the industry all together or even leave to work for Jet*:ugh:

SOC just means you've been taken off the roster. It could be anything from an investigation to your medical has expired.

Anyway, I left REX in 2007 after reading a magazine interview with JD that basically said, " we don't want to pay our pilots any more. What's the point? They are going to leave anyway."

He went on to say, " the Saab 340 is a great aircraft and we have no plans of replacing it at any stage."

After reading those 2 statements I said "I'm outa here".

The company is stagnant, any thought of anything changing is non existant. Pilots will still be performing min-rest overnights and waiting for a car park space in years to come. Such a shame there is no dialogue.

By the way, when is Saab going to stop supporting the 340? Those EFIS systems must be pretty old now...

There goes another one

Melbourne Senior Check and Trainer (and he was one of the good ones)

Who's next??????

I understand Rex's subsidiaries are losing both brand new and experienced crews, along with other valuable senior management and staff, rather rapidly too thanks to Rex's increasing involvement in every aspect of their Ops. On an objective level, however, it has to be admired how Rex has refined a way of extracting every little bit of fun from flying.

Checked

:ok: