Dear CX Management..
 

Less than 2 months....
Expat Housing and benefits cease at the end of this year. Many of your Senior Captains and F/O's will be submitting their 3 months notice shortly. A large number are current Trainers.
All US, Middle Eastern and now numerous European Airlines are hiring.
Previous pilot employees whom you are currently calling have no interest in rejoining.
New candidates must pay their own travel expenses to interview and if successful will then be bonded. Why bother when no other airlines require such an impost?
Your 'recovery' plans will be null and void if you do not address Expat benefits and/or substantially improve COS18. Simple.
Time is no longer on your side.

For those who currently remain, Hotel lockdowns at outports will remain well into 2023. There is no incentive for the company to repeal them.

Why would CX need to improve the conditions, to retain thousands of pilots, when the country is still closed? Are you foreseeing that changing sometime soon? This year?

The current training task greatly exceeds training capability. If further trainers and/or senior staff leave the capability reduces even further. You can add as many S/O's or DEFO's as you like but they will simply join a lengthy queue.
Therefore, you need to be well ahead of the Training requirement prior to any 'opening'.
Ryanair was and they have made hundreds of millions over the Northern Summer. Qantas and BA were not and have been beset by problems.
A significant number of senior staff are leaving shortly. There is one final opportunity to prevent them from doing so.

Done deal
 

anyone that was gonna quit when housing finished would have handed in their 3 month notice already…

it’s fait accompli.

I haven't yet.....YET!!!

Some random observations ..

We have no pilot shortage as long as mainlanders can't travel. Which will be a long time still.

Many will keep resigning well into next year as their new job offers arrive/ plans fall into place - so end of this year resignations won't be a true reflection of how many will leave.

Covid restrictions in hkg will continue for much longer than anyone thought.

Cx is basically bankrupt so don't expect much of an improvement to cos18 any time soon.

CX is now a contract employer but without any of the pay/rostering/commuting etc guarantees a(for example) 5 year Korean contract offers.

CX offers you absolutely zero ability to plan how your pay, your promotion, your fleet, your housing and benefits or any other aspect of you career will progress .

They still prefer to replace the majority of the current disgruntled pilot workforce with happier new hires.

Latest FOP update explicitly mentions rank upgrades/promotion now entirely based on personal records and performance. Seniority is officially dead. You go sick you don't get upgraded is the clear message. Command upgrades out of seniority soon. Many more will resign as a result.

Big threat now is a drop in cargo rates as the recession sets in while at the same time more cargo capacity comes online worldwide. Potential for cx losses to actually increase and passenger aircraft doing cargo only flying to end up being parked again.

Yet another soothsayer of impending doom - that of course not going to happen.
If one believed the horror scenarios posted here over the past 2 years the airline would be minus at least 5000 pilots by now.

Not one untrue word there

New service on the A50 starting soon. Just for you DCD. HKG ARN. You should be on it.

Yet another very intelligent insightful post Menelaus..........

As much as your post makes sense. I'm afraid anyone attending the Friday midday management teams meeting gets to see how stupid some of the questions being asked are. Management continually rolling their eyes and referring to it being answered before. Plus management chanting the same old mantra of " the package is competitive, we are aware of the attrition, and we will address it accordingly. Or we will look into it and get back to you". People "volunteering" still for loops and complaining about having hours chopped or 7 day lockdown in the headland. If sickness is their big determiner of promotion then that's just a band-aid over a festering sore. Honestly management won't do anything until they have to. The China allowance was an answer to high sickness. The quarantine allowance was a bribe to get volunteers when there were none. The low MPP for the 747 and higher allowance vs the other fleets! If sickness is high enough for q3 patterns then they will introduce a q3 allowance. The same way they did for cabin crew on high sickness patterns. The squeaky wheel gets the grease!

If they recorded the Friday torture for others to watch, people wouldn’t ask the same **** every week.

For some reason only the Airbus meetings get recorded.

Wonder why?! 🤓🤔

Re volunteers…are you serious?
There will always be someone…starting with the junior SO all the way to the senior BTC

agreed, from now afar pretty close to reality I would think.

With all due respect I recommend you adopt the attitude of 'who cares'.

The board have decided on POS18. RH and GMA are implementing it and more. All departments are encouraged to treat aircrew (front and rear) like ****. The company now has a cheap workforce and the ability to change all conditions as they see fit. They don't care about how much money could be made in the short term, the board is looking far further out than that.

Even if we were the right size for all the demand that will occur when the borders open, you won't get any of the rewards - do you remember when CX made record profits but it wasn't enough to trigger a profit share?

So the best way to manage your relationship with the company is to work when it suits you, make the most of your days off and plan your exit.

‘A through planning process in place……’ (Yammer)
Misguided..
You are already finding it difficult to train the required number of Training Captains.
Meanwhile, a sizeable number of STC’s and TC’s are about to leave.
Less than 1 Command upgrade per week presently; while 2 resign..
Demand is about to soar. Well past your projections while the end of the year looms.
Operational chaos is mere months away.
I strongly suggest you reread my opening post.

Noting the historic strength of the HKD against the home currencies of many HK expatriates, especially AUD, CAD UKL and EUR, this might be an encouraging time to take an early retirement.

Then again if the pension fund/provident fund is down the tubes there may well be no advantage, and simply having a job in an inflationary time is a recommendation.

There does not appear to be any point in waiting until Jan 1st for the "discretionary bonus" in December as it will probably only be worth the famous "bottle of beer."

I wish you the best in your decision.

Bonus will be 6 months of salary or 200 hkd, whichever is less.

CX New Bot program

Dear GH,

I appreciate the push now to develop bots through the Polytechnic program will alleviate immense pressure on CoS18.

What I want to know is when the bots can’t fulfill the requirements of experience? We all know the Sinobots need 10 years programming. Have you developed a new superbot program that can be effective in half that time?

The Poly U will generate a superbot for you I suspect, but is the airline prepared for the risk? I know the CAD is onboard.

Oh don't get me started. Oh, you have. I'll try to be brief.

The Secretary for Transport and Logistics Mr Lam Sai-hung said today's signing ceremony ... marked the first time that aviation theory courses would be taught by a local institution.

Well after PPL we tried in the HK Aviation club to teach CPL courses until CAD said "Cannot". When we had a meeting with CAD the person in charge of licensing at the time was asked by their senior FOI why the club had been banned. She looked at the table and said, "It's tradition." He restored sanity by saying that he thought it was a tradition that needed changing. Give CAD their due, they then allowed CPL training without being employed by a HK AOC operator.

I assume that under the new HK education language regulations the CPL/ATPL ground school courses will be required to be taught in Mandarin. Fair enough, a law is a law. So presumably 3 months of the course before flight training will be spent getting the cadets up to level 4 English.

Maybe they should just bite the bullet and say we need to send HK cadets to China for full ATPL training. At least most of the mainland pilots I have met speak better aviation English than the current stream of HK applicants.

​​​​​​​Muppets

Checked out the article…

This phrase piqued my interest….. “……develop Hong Kong as a hub for aviation training.….”

Hub? Hub? But of course, with all that unrestricted and uncontrolled airspace, HK would be a natural choice for a hub. Silly me.