Thanks again. I wanted to understand the policy behind base allocations, knowing very little about Wizzair.
I have been in eastern Europe and in the Balkans for many years during my military times, and i agree with you. Its not bad at all if one is willing to adapt.
Tirana in a nice place for example, not expensive and now there are flights to most european destinations from LATI.

chinese3NMofftrack

and my friend you also are not saying the truth.

commuting is not possible because you are not giving fix Roster pattern to your pilots but random roster instead.
commuting is not possible because you don’t give airline tickets to your employees.
commuting is not possible because you decreased salaries 30% on 2020 with the promise of “Chef Varadi” to restore salaries by March 2021. Nothing of that has happened.
commuting is not possible because you fired 300 pilots last years, TRIs, TREs and now you don’t have training capabilities enough and you are smashing literally the pilots that remain in the company.

what quality of life my friend? Only local pilots with families on their base could have a bit of decent life. For expats joining the company it will be the hell.

aviation is a small world, while some CEOs receive 100£ mill bonus, their pilots live a miserable life in Eastern Europe. Rebound is here and pilots are gonna go far far far away of this company and they will have serious problems to find pilots and release them very soon.

Life is a double way street

good luck

Getting a mortgage and buing a house?
Having your elderly parents, partially immobile, living at your place with the local health and social security service deployed to keep them safe?
Your kids aged 5 and 13 going to school and learning in their native language, or at least in English?
Wife working as a nurse at the vet's for a salary that covers the expenses in case daddy breaks ankle slipping on the ice one day?
Organizing Christmas get-together for the extended family of 15 people?

That is life.

Being 1 hour from parking checklist to the beach is having a good time.

Of course the company hangs the carots where otherwise they'd need to increase pay to get crewed. And there is no shame in accepting outpost deployment on a mission (upgrade) if it is for career development. Just make sure you understand well what that later career is like.

For the long term, WZZ work schedule and pay only supports local crew at bases. Expat job needs to pay more for the same work comparing to home. Other than that, you've accepted re-location.

chinese3NMofftrack

RYR treated their pilot crew on par with the largest EU legacy behemoths, not fired the full-time employees to keep the cheaper and more disposable contractors on board.
RYR pays almost triple than WZZ
RYR has a fixed work pattern with 4 days off
RYR has union recognition in some countries, meaning they cannot use the individual pilot groups against each other
RYR bases are also 1 hour away from very cool stuff.

Ever tried bumping your shopping cart accidentaly into the wrong guys's car at a shopping mall garage in TIA?

Do that also in the civilised UK, report back.

FlightDetent

I think you have no idea about the salary structure within Wizz in regards to basic vs flexible pay components.

Almost 3 times more would mean a Ryan Air FO raking in 6 figures (EUR), and a captain making close to what used to be the going rate in China pre-Covid

Aforementioned KUT capt. sum for 2020, please spread the good news.

Not pink PDF (have those, albeit AUH), but rather take home after tax, green printed papers. 😉

To match your PRC comparison it needs to be 9k. Shall we agree to have been symmetrically hyperbolic?

Pearlharbour

Hello again my bitter friend, I love how you say "you" like I'm personaly in charge of wizz and doing these thing to pilots in the company.

Yes, right now the roster is completely random due to the lack of pilots. And it is not great. But as it was before, fixed roster will come back again...even with the possibility of 14/7 for those who want.
For commuters there are free tickets between pre-approved bases, so no, not true.
As for the rest,salaries, ceo bonus targets,etc.... honestly I'm not going to continue arguing.
You clearly think to know more than everyone and I'm clearly not going to (or want to) change your mind.

Wizz is far from a perfect company and there are many other companies that offer better and with more "western" conditions.

Quality of life is what you can make it out of it and be happy with it.

Hi FlightDetent,

First of all, RYR is a company "born and raised" in Western Europe. Wizz is not.
I do agree that during the pandemic, RYR behaved liked a proper airline. You're just forgetting how many years it took, and how many fights, and how many union meetings and more fights it took for it to reach to these "on par with the largest EU legacy behemoths".

Again, most RYR bases are in the west so therefore salaries and quality of life (city lifestyle, education, restaurants, etc) will be higher than in most eastern cities...and triple might be a bit of a stretch, no?

Wizz used to have a pretty solid roster pattern and hopefully will return when the numbers are back to normal.

You guys keep comparing apples with oranges. Nobody is saying that Wizz is better than RYR or Easyjet pilots related (imagine the cabin crew), Wizz is Wizz.

And I completely agree with you guys if they want to expand and grow as planned, they'll need to improve the conditions to a different level. Especially when investing so heavily in a country like Italy.

If you are about to explain how fair Wizz policies are, let me remind you about how the selection for redundancies was made!

A question to those who have applied or are already working at Wizz - do you still need to do that stupid "personality test" to match their "company profile" (must be some kind of extravert)?

FlightDetent

I'm going by actual numbers. A SFO flying around 650 hours in 2020 (Certainly, at one of the bases least affected by restrictions), took home 38.5k EUR (Confair, no multiplier). Times that by 3 would put a Ryan Air FO at 115k for the year.
A 1st year captain (<1000 PIC hours) flying the same sectors/distance would earn 72.5k EUR pre-tax. Times 3 would put him at 217k for the year, around 255k USD, or 21.250 USD/month. Fairly close to China, isn't it? - though I give you the pre-tax vs take home difference.

I'm in no way defending those salaries, by the way, Just trying to keep it realistic.

Hi guys, just to understand : how much make a F/O per month flying around 70hrs.
Is it still possible to commute between the bases as a "floating F/O "?

Is it possible to fly back home fro free ?

Thanks.

Okay. So I understand you’re paid as a contractor and pay no social security that will contribute to your pension savings? Or maybe a bit of social contributions in some obscure Eastern European country? An SFO with another company french based would cost wise reach more than 100 as the social cost is a very large part of the total cost for the company. Sadly contractors never seem to understand this and the companies take full advantage of that. The previous post arguing 3 times as much is not as far of as you think but it might not be the right company to make that comparison with as Ryanair still employ on contracts in some bases..

Pension savings? You must be either kidding (I hope so) or very naive. There won't be any "savings" paid out what you "saved". It turns out to be a scam in most cases, besides, value of money decreases. When I was born my parents opened a "child's insurance account" and were paying voluntarily about 10-15 roubles per month at that time, which was quite siginificant amount of money back then. Later, Soviet Union collapsed, they continued paying. Indeed, when I turned 18, the "insurance" paid out the money, which was a total sum of 220 Lt (Litas, national currency) back then. This is equivalent to 63.71 € according to official conversion rate. How I used this amount of money, you wonder? I paid for pizza's and my coca-cola at a cafe where we were celebrating the day of school diploma.

Moral of the story - learn to save yourself and don't trust anyone regarding your money.

Totally agree with hid3. Do you want to be really resilient? Then invest in your finance education. Even if you work at Air France.

Using the fall of the Soviet union as an example of why pension systems never work is slightly far fetched. The discussion was wether Ryanair pays 3 times as much as Wizz. Can’t speak for Ryan but the employment cost, including pension payments to a separate pension for pilots and other social contributions here in France will very likely cost a normal airline more than 3 times as much as a Wizz air contractor would in an Eastern European country. The discussion about pension and wether or not it’s a scam is probably for another tread.

Apologies for dragging this sideways with the 3x. While not a typo then, 2x should have been the number. PM available but closing now with accurate numerics:

- 2019 PRC standard EUR 21,5k / m after tax (~ 35% deducted locally)- post #1999: ' earn 72.5k EUR pre-tax. Times 3 would put him at 217 for the year ... fairly close - Err, no. 72,5 * (100 - 40)% = 3620 EUR net. Three times that is 11k. Deffo not the RYR take home, yet pretty short of 21,5 k out east.
Technicalities, sure. Jobless from China is the same as anywhere else.

Main point was that portraying TBS / TIA as 'actually good' requires a lot of pink illumination. Honestly respecting those making the leap, still, in the general discourse 'reasonably manageable' and 'with limited long-term earning prospects' describe the fit better. Assuming no plan to relocate long-term.

Come on, you can't take Ryanair out Ryanair. Marauders of court decisions, non-compliant by intent. No doubt MOL dreams it made sense again to run the ship same as JV again.

The first EE countries to legalize self-emplyed pilot were POL and CZE (not exhaustive) but only some 15 years after Republic of Ireland Holdings Ltd. was allowed to run the show. Anywhere WZZ went in the EE they had to offer local contracts.

FD's fun with flags:
Name the countries where the following companites are incorporated: Brookfield Aviation, Rishworth, Confair, Mountain High Consultants, Aeroprofessional (bonus points for marking Commonwealth states).

West fares better because employee abuse no logner makes financial sense, as opposed to being any more cultured. A recent case of WZZ manager's speech explains that well.

The unions were only allowed at RYR where absolutely no other corporate choice was feasible. High hopes this is irreversible and the future brings the same to Wizz. Lack of job takers and people voting with feet is the necessary ingredient.

Pilots flying 100 hrs/28 days, no rosters, asking pilots giving vacation for free. Asking for flying days off. Lowering the salaries, there is no plan B

the plan is distroy your crews making flying to the limit this summer and ask for unpaid leave in winter. Pilots fatigued mentally and phisically. Cancelling flights and leaving people in ground for their summer vacation due to lack of crews. Chaos.
training department without enough capacity. Not enough line training captains etc etc etc

and at the same time Mr.Varadi making 100 £ mill bonus. 🏃‍♂️

This is WIZZAIR today

This airline is heading for disaster. They are totally losing sight of what's important just to save money, but the reality is crumbling around them. Crews are looking to leave, cabin crew are walking out of induction courses because they are being spoken to like dirt, contracts are being changed time and time again, crew and passenger food if you are lucky, while shares are being handed out to management for keeping us on furlough for a year. Expansion beyond it's current level can't be managed in it's current format, so it really is a risky and unhappy place to be.

they had everything perfectly set before the pandemic to be a good low cost airline in Europe. Nice Airplanes, investors, money, routes, new bases, well prepared pilots with low cost experience. Suddenly they decided to change their stuff policy and fire 300 very well prepared guys without reason.
now they are just starting to suffer the consecuencies.

now they have the worst of the worst reputation between pilots community in Europe. And the people that still working for them are desperate to have “something” to run far way of them.

so good luck with the expansion WIZZAIR!
life is a double street way, remember?

What expansion? They can hardly make 60-70% of their existing fleet flying even with crews maxxed out. There was not a single day this summer when more than 100 out of 140 aircraft were used. A company with 50 aircraft on ground wet-leasing five aircraft for lack of crew... Yet they are still going on and on about being the strategic winner of the pandemic. Even a child knows that if you are short of crews (and practically every resources because of your ULCC philosophy) the most stupid thing you can do is to open new bases every other day to spread yourself even thinner. Let's find something else we can brag about then: being the greenest airline of Europe! Is cramming the highest possible number of seats into a 321 enough? No, the greenest airline of Europe would stop burning thousands of tons of additional fuel only to make money for the investors. Stop the extra burn for tankering (to avoid refueling at expensive stations); hundreds of ferry flights to save money on maintenance; fuel stops by the dozen for commercial overweight (are we at Keflavik yet? No it's only Stavanger); don't skip the aircraft and engine washes (just take a look at HA-LTD now), then you may start talking about being green.

Hi guys, I have a question for those who have travelled to Budapest from an EU member state for the assessments this month. It's regarding the travel restrictions. Is the Certificate of Travel ("entry for business and economic purposes") that Wizz Air sends to the applicant enough to be allowed entry in Hungary without a a PCR Test or without having the EU Digital Covid Certificate? According to the information from the Hungarian official websites, it should be enough, but Im afraid that the airline won't accept the certificate because the info is not too cIear. I would be grateful if someone with recent experience traveling to hungary could comment on this. Thank you in advance.

I am going there with Wizz mobility letter and the EU green pass (2 jabs completed).
Hope this helps 👍🏻

Thanks Giuff. I was considering getting the EU Digital Certificate, but my only option is to get a PCR test from EU approved lab (€€€). Better be safe than sorry though :)

You can get the EU green pass after the second jab (at least in my country), its free and valid for 270 days.

maverickflyer

In May I traveled to Budapest with Wizz Air "Certificate of Travel" - no problems. I wasn't vaccinated and had no PCR test with me.

Applied and rejected automatically!

“You have not been selected”

more than 800 hours jet and last flight this month!

must be the 300 hours IFR in the last 12 months…

Not possible buddy. Are you sure you did not miss any box in the application?
I did not fly for a year and they called me.

I applied a year ago. I have I’ve 5600 hours on jet and they haven’t call me.

JOC
 

Hi guys,
Do you have information if JOC is necessary for non type rated cadets?
how does the assessment look like for NTR cadets?

Giuff

will check again

Gruff
when did you apply? Are you typed?
Thanks man

few weeks ago. Yes, rated.

Invited twice but never found an available slot.

Has anyone actually started conversion training and flying? Or is it recruitment for 2022 start dates?

I've been told they have reinstated the pre-Covid payscale.

PilotLZ
I have on good authority that this month there is line training taking place out of a Southern Italian base.

Still covid payscale. A friend of mine just sent me his sched and told me what he'd got in the bank. Way better than it was before as he almost maxed out on duty however the paycheck was about 25% shy of what he'd got for this amount of flying pre-covid.

Edit: what pisses me and many off is that they are hiring and training ppl when about half of the pilots who got the boot last year are still waiting for a spot to come back to however :mad: might be the base and the contract. You simply can't just lay off ppl without calling them back first before any other external candidates. Shame on wizz. Shame on everybody who is assisting to this. Trainers should really put their foot down and plain simply refuse to train anyone before their ex-colleagues are getting their jobs back! Now this would be the time. Management couldn't do anything to them. You can't fire all your TRI-s and LTC-s. The whole house of cards would just fall and they know it.

Wrong...they will manage to find LTC flying for free for the sake of “ prestige “ or some other kind of carrot...

Maybe old information but 1st year FO starting salary is £18k appox?