VA ATR EBA Negotiations
 

Well the time has come people. The ATR eba is up for negotiation. It seems like VA are going for a separate eba so the ATR may finally become a true member of Virgin Australia mainline.

Now to see what happens...Will the company continue to the treat the ATR crew like trash, play hardball and push away as any more pilots as they can? Will they continue to screw the existing pilots who have been wearing the VA uniform and flying a VA tail for 7 years in favour of people off the street (who join the 737 on better wages in a preferred bases)?

It's about time that VA started treating ATR crew like real VA pilots and allow them to move on to a position/base/fleet in accordance with the Group date of Join. Its the only fleet in the entire VA group with a 10% cap on movement on it, so its time for that to go. They should at the least be allowing pilots to bid and be awarded a position/base in line with their seniority. If they don't want to release them instantly, bypass pay should be paid considering the number of new hires on the the 737 in east coast bases on better T&C's.

They are short on pilots, in particular captains on the fleet. But who in their right mind would want to join the ATR with such terrible conditions when you could go to QF/JQ/QLink or even VA 737 and earn more money, with better career progression and better rosters?

It's time for the company to work WITH the pilots and not AGAINST them. It would be great to see the ATR flourish but with such neglect and continued poor management, more and more pilots are going to leave inevitably creating the demise of the ATR at VA.

Did they not get rid of them all? How many are left?

I thought the plan was to sell them all off thus none of the above will be relevant.

IIRC the plan was to retain six -600s. That meant getting rid of all -500s plus the surplus -600s.

They would probably be better of getting rid of the lot and opting for the -700 MAX. Only issue would be the likes of Albury/Tamworth.

One less level of cost to deal with.

Correct, the plan is to reduce to 6 aircraft. However they are still short on crew.

The unfortunate issue for the crew who remain is that they are bound by one of the worst airline agreements out there. They are one the seniority list for VA however they are not given the right to move fleets unlike everyone else on the list.

The ATR pilots are at the mercy of the company. They have to continue to bear the brunt of any future poor decisions by the company, wether that may be closing a base, reducing the flying further or getting rid of the fleet as whole. There is no stability or certainty for these pilots.

As mentioned in another thread, there are ATR pilots who have been awarded 737 positions over a year ago but still have not been released/given a start date. Meanwhile, people fresh out of GA have already completed type ratings and are commencing line training despite being 300 positions lower on the seniority list.

Hevilift is getting two of the VA ATR's for ops out of BNE including Moranbah I believe starting in May.

Yep starts next week. Great work to all the guys at Hevilift!

http://i68.tinypic.com/mx11ly.jpg

2 aircraft but no pilots to fly them....

How is the salary at VA and Hevilift for Atr Capt?

Virgin decision making at its finest...

Two variants (500 & 600) are costing money through inefficiencies, so they decide to remove the -500 from service (but don't think about the training implications involving converting their pilots on delta courses in Asia).

Moranbah is a non-profitable route, so they cut it from their own operations and give it away to Alliance. Alliance take Gladstone, Emerald, Bundy etc. with arms wide open. However, can't get an exemption to fly jets into Moranbah. QLink must be loving it.

So what do Virgin do? Unpack an ATR 72-500 from NZ storage (which they're still paying lease costs on) and give it to Hevilift to operate charters on their behalf. Does this really save them money?

Or they could have saved themselves the pain of a mass crew exodus and increased training costs by just leaving one or two airframes in Brisbane to cover a reduced schedule.

They have the crew in Brisbane to fly it. Didn't they just sign contracts to remain in Brisbane and commute south to operate? How does that fit into the future EBA?

Vh-fts all you have said is correct. How decisions are made at virgin...no one knows. But they never seem to be the right decisions.

There are crews based in Brisbane who commute to Sydney and Canberra. A few frames in Brisbane with flights to Moranbah and Rockhampton would have saved the crews a lot of pain and heartache and would have saved the company money.

However it seems virgin simply want to torment the ATR crews as much as possible. Abuse them until they decide to leave seems to be their game plan...must be a result of the virgin decision making strategy

Hevilift Australia will be bust in under 12 months.
They tried twice before unsuccessfully.