The problem is not with the cadets per se: I am sure they will be excellent aviators, in the future.

The problem lies with the fact that 800 zero hours pilots are replacing 800 20,000h Captains and experienced FOs.

Exactly. Hundreds of experienced pilots, many with 20-30 years of service, have either taken redundancies or resigned, to be replaced by people with zero experience.

Agreed that the company's path forward is hollowing out the one aspect of the airlines operation that built their reputation of competence and safety.

No cadet is replacing a senior captain. A slightly less senior captain is replacing the senior captain.

The whole safety argument is futile. No one cares.

No Zapp, there is no such thing as a zero hour pilot. And no pilot (who has just finished flight school) suddenly becomes a captain of a 777, 747 etc.
There are many many many pilots in CX right now that joined with under 1000 hours, and all those hours were in light single engine aircraft eg. instructors. and they're doing great.
BOAC used to hire pilots straight from flight school, circuits & bumps in their large twin jets back in the day.

The problem now a days is with very senior captains and those who have retired, they joined airlines around the world with very low hours, sometimes no twin time at all, let alone a jet. Then years later when they were on selection boards they kept raising the entry levels to youngsters (who were like them) oh you need 1500 hours, then 3000 hours, then jet time, then EFIS time, then a degree! Meanwhile they had none of that when they joined. But when the world is short of pilots, they quickly change their tune.

Anyone can be anything they want, just put the work in.

Oli your analogy is BS.
“Doing great” as a general statement is far removed from what I have witnessed
Experience counts, that is a given.
Spin your argument anyway you wish but keep to the facts and erase the conjecture please
You haven’t been around long enough to make any such assumptions.
I’ll be looking at the Crw composition when staff travel eventually opens up and the decision will be based on competence not nationality or path travelled (sic)

I’m intrigued as to how you can judge the competence of a set of crew by just looking at the crew list. Do you have access to the whole pilot body’s ERAS/TPMS? Maybe you are a STC and will only fly with crew who you’ve personally checked out and gave a 5, or else you are not getting on? Forgive me but I am genuinely curious how you judge competence via a crew list. Do tell.

And I wholly agree that the fault and cause of it all lies with the company and beancounters, not the fault of the cadets, who have to go through the same training and checks as someone who joined 20 years ago as SO with 3500 hours turboprop. We shouldn’t bring hate on each other as a group but I needed to call out stereotyping when I see it.

Domino effect going down line, each FO who upgrades to captain will have to be replaced with an SO. Fresh cadets in SO seats are woefully inadequately trained and qualified to fill the FO seat. They need much more training and skills built up before they can replace an FO. It's not their fault whatsoever. This is how cathay cadet system has always worked. They show up with minimum training cost to put them in a SECOND OFFICER" seat not a FIRST OFFICER" seat. There have been several cadet second officers who couldn't qualify to even be checked out of SO training on the 747 because they couldn't manage to handle engine failures on theb747 and after much attempt to train and qualify them they had to be put on the Airbus so they could be passed the training. This is an example of facts.

You need to look further than your own nose to see downline.

The point being missed is that cathay pilot training is and always has been a joke. You either bring experience and skills with you or you spend time building it in a do-it-yourself checking environment. A cadet who has just been checked out to the line at cathay can barely perform Scond Officer duties (not qualified for takeoffs and landings, a bare basic minimum of piloting skills and qualifications) In fact some can't make it on the 747 after much simulator training (due to not being able to handle an engine failure practice in the simulator) and have to be placed on the airbus which is easier to fly. This is a fact which has been repeated several times in the last few years. It will take them at least a couple of years of putting in the work to the point where they can barely perform as junior First Officers. It takes as much as 4 years for a fresh hired cadet to make it as a junior First Officer. This has nothing to do with being local or not. This is cathay. Cathay doesn't have the training resources or efficiency to hire and train any more than a couple of hundred pilots per year even if experienced ones are hired off the street as direct entry. They have to spend a lot of money and time to develop their training department into something which it is not even close to at present time. How will they fill the seats being vacated at an alarming rate up the chain? A cadet hired today has no chance of flying a cathay airplane even as a second officer for 1.5 to 2 years. You can't replace a 1000 experienced pilots with a 1000 cadets in short time. It's physically time, MONEY, and effort consuming. And MONEY consuming.

Regardless of the propaganda BS they're putting out, they're very concerned about the exodus of pilots which is already well underway even before covid recovery. What they're hoping will work is to increase pay and benefits to the point which at least slows the exodus until they have enough cheaper pilots online so they can again cut the pay and benefits back down to the low level it is now or even lower as much as they can.

But having zero credibility left as an employer it's curious to see how how many pilots will be desperate enough to work for such an employer. The genie they let out of the bottle in October 2021 by cancelling our "employment contracts" permanently and placing us on "company policy" under the threat of being fired in 2 weeks, which is amenable at company's full discretion in every possible way as often as they want, can never be put back into the bottle. Whoever was the genius behind this must be recognized for doing so eternally. Greg H. And the board of directors who went along with it.

Even if they again offer a document written in the form of "employment contract" in the future to say "ok we're offering you an actual contract again" , cathay has proven via legal precedence that an "employment contract" you sign with cathay isn't worth the toilet paper you're signing it on. They can again cancel it as they wish anytime they want. You're mentally ill if you consider any cathay employment document any more than toilet paper ever again. How can you possibly plan for retirement having no way of knowing how much your career earnings will be at Cathay in X amount of years? Hong Kong banks have been bulking at giving cathay pilots any loans because of this fact. Your earnings are no longer guaranteed at any level for any amount of time.

They'll spend much more money than they thought they'd save by cancelling all employment contracts to attract and keep pilots only for short terms. Training costs will have to skyrocket to replace the constant attrition rate. Utter failure is all cathay as a business deserves at this point. It's nice to sit back and watch with some popcorn and laugh. It will be many years to establish anything hoping to supply enough local pilots as replacements. In the meantime, a forced shrinkage of the airline due to lack of pilots. Even the locals they train will then have to be paid well enough to keep them from leaving. There's no way cathay will save money as a result of contract cancelation. In the end, it will cost them more money and they've lost employer credibility forever. They want to sell this taco stand to someone else and get out but it being a penny stock company at this point (near worthless) they'd need to re-establish it to raise the stock price and you can't do that when your airplanes don't have enough pilots to fly them when it's time to ramp up flight operations. They made the judgment they would have sold and be out in 2 years making the crew shortage someone else's problem and hong kong covid being nowhere near allowing a recovery has completely f'ed their delusional plans.

Popcorns...

So does Western Culture and a steep bone headed stubbornness Hierarchy, that have led to a number of high profile prangs.

The reason Asian airlines need to look at expats is thanks to their superior national economies they don't have the time or money to waste faffing around with the nonsense that is general aviation flight training.

That's why hired help is brought from other countries to temporarily backfill so that training of highly talented local cadets can be done before the expats bugger off back to their homes - if they haven't ended up causing a mishap like the French gentleman at Air Asia.

Am I doing this right?

Unfortunately with POS18 any increase can be taken away just as quick... toilet paper is more useful than the paper POS18 is written on

Unfortunately there are many airlines around the world whose pilots get a lot less than CX ‘s “new deal”. It is from there where they’ll find a constant stream of experienced pilots to warm the seats.

There has never been a shortage of hungry experienced pilots.

Note: I made no mention about quality, which is a trait becoming ever more redundant with advances in technology and systems. Management knows this.

Indeed, I suspect they are very well aware, hence the ban for circling approaches, for GS intercept from above, the "push/roll/thrust" in case you don't know how to recover from a stall.
The new training motto is: "If it's too difficult, don't teach it, just ban it."

Soon enough, it will be no more FO landing, and autoland only for the CN.

Intersection departures at AirArabia 😒 come to mind

In my experience It’s always the young SO’s and FO’s that say “experience doesn’t matter” ……..what else would you expect the tree up hugging woke brigade to say?

Experience doesn’t matter a hell of a lot until it DOES and by then it’s usually too late.

Cathay will come to regret disposing of all the experienced drivers ( CN and FO ) like cheap paper towels…..

They’ll end up just being another low cost smear on the ground……..

I was flying with a young pilot , we were told to hold at Magog , the FO inserted the appropriate holding pattern into the FMC , the only problem was the outbound leg took us through a large CB clearly visible on the ND . I waited a while to see if he was actually aware of the CB . Nope he was very happy to hold as published flying through the CB . I had to intervene .
‘this is not about Asian vs European, it’s about experience vs inexperience .
on long haul flights with minimal yearly sectors it takes years to gain the necessary experience to sit in the left seat , now add a new captain with a very new FO and you have a less than ideal situation

No evidence I am aware of that LCC have higher accident rates than FSC.

Rumour: Extension of housing and schooling beyond December 2022 is being seriously discussed at top managerial level due ‘ catastrophically high’ level of resignations.
This would tally with Kempis stating that COS18 is always being reviewed and is reviewable. (Although not in itself confirmation of the rumour.)

Too little too late?

Interesting to see whether the leadership team will deny this in a Teams meeting…..

Too little too late. The horse has bolted.

With a contract that's 'amendable from time to time', and having seen CX's true colours, and the hopeless pit of despair HK is now, no one in their right mind would stay, even for more pay + housing/schooling extension.

We all tolerated Hong Kong for decades because the bucket of cash well outweighed the bucket of poop. Now that it's gone completely the other way... forget about it.

At least we walked away with 1-2 million usd in P fund and housing profits.

No regrets from me, but not looking back. Ever.

Correction - I do look back, fondly, at my time at CX, pre-covid. And thank Cathay for setting me up, financially secure, to now live in a proper civilised country and not a dystopian nightmare.