About 50 first officers and about 45 captains prematurely terminated in these trying and taxing Covid19 times. With no other airline or company willing to recruit them due to heavy jugular bleeding themselves.
You call this Fair or Just ?
I call it CONVENIENCE. Just like everything else that saudia does. Treat everything and everyone on the same platform. Like an unpaid BIT@H.,,!!
At the very least I call it HARAM.

And someone somewhere shall pay for it.

Well, I think from what I heard that Saudia also is suffering as all other airlines in this Corona Crisis. So, if any airline in the world would think of letting go of employees, of course those would be the expats not the locals because if they chose the locals, the union or the media will criticize that.

besides, Saudia according to what I know was used to pay the highest to the expats. Especially, the re-contract bonus, and the kids education to homeland schools that some took advantage of that to earn more. So, maybe the airline decided that enough is enough, especially SAUDIZATION is a must by end of 2020 by force from higher authorities.

To all Saudia expats, lets be mature and stop insulting the airline by calling and mentioning bad words, remember that the airline hired lots of jobless pilots and has given pilots alot.
So, Stop misleading others by accusing local pilots of being lousy and accusing local co-pilots of being bad and not ready for command. All airlines know what is right for them or wrong, they care about Safety, and High level of Safety was never related to having more expats in an airline.
And instead of Mourning your Luck, You better from now on think of solutions for you and look for somewhere else in the world.

In brief, It is crystal clear, that all airlines are suffering, so they make pay cuts, they force people to leave, or they shut down and collapse, so take it or leave it.

Every ‘other world’ airline follows basic humane rules of employment and termination.
The termination clause used to be just a simple formality that was inserted decades ago by bean counters and lawyers.
More a myth than a reality.
SAUDIA has managed to make it a very stark reality !
And what a sad time to do it. When pilots needed some little form of assurity if nothing else.
Something like kicking a dying man on his hospital bed !

Baxo Peace
☠️

One day your words will come back to bite you squarely in the ass. Think carefully about the words you choose habibi, you may find yourself in the same position one day....and soon.

Really.... your lack of historical knowledge is so obvious ! Slavery has been around since thousands of years, across the whole world. Every empire that has risen has used some form of slavery. From Asia to Africa, in the Americas and in Europe.

Indeed... your post is also absolute senseless nonsense ! Sounds like the mad ramblings of some right-wing KKK Christian fanatic ! FGM pre-dates Arab civilisations and Islam by hundreds, if not thousands, of years, originating in Africa and not Arabia. Polygamy is practiced in many different religious societies around the world, ( even if the national governing laws prohibit it ), as forced / arranged marriage is as well. Under-age marriage is still legal in many parts of the world - a quarter of the States in the U.S.A. have no minimum age for girls to marry, and the age of consent in well over a dozen European countries ( including Germany and Sweden ) is only 14 or 15.

I hope nutters like yourself stay away from aircraft !

Nuweiba, get a grip. And read some of your history. The first written reference to slavery is in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi back in 1860 BC. Slavery was practiced by the Sumerians as far back as 3500 BC. And the massive trade of over 17 million Africans to Arabia and then more widely was orchestrated by muslim arabs from various regions of what is now the Middle East. To be fair, this trade existed in pre-muslim Arabia, going back to the times I referenced earlier.And in Saudi Arabia, slavery was officially banned in 1962, after pressure from Great Britain.

Your post only reinforces my claim that your knowledge is somewhat lacking. It’s Hammurabi and not Nammurabi. You can not consider the Babylonian Empire to be part of Arabia any more than you would consider Ancient Egypt. And slavery existed around the world thousands of years before the first written records of slavery - in fact, slavery existed thousands of years before writing in any form was established ! It is you who needs to get a grip and stop being so biased !

Mate , give it a rest ! ME is notorious for not honouring contracts . Most expats know that before going .

By far the most entertaining thread on this site... much needed these times ... keep it up chaps!
Joking aside, my commiserations to any pilot losing their job these days - be they expats, Saudi's or others.

As Fatbus pointed out, any expats taking on a job in the middle east are fully aware of the risks and conditions - that is why you are being paid a premium for working there. Complaining about it ex-post is unseemly and disingenuous. Personally I enjoyed my time in Saudi, and the vast majority of the Saudi's I met were stand-up people. Although I had my share of "unexpected" experiences, I'm not bitter and I hold the country in great affection. I've certainly met more bad apples on the streets of London, Paris, LA, etc...

Been an expat for 40 years, including 10 years in JED. One thing I have learned is that stereotyping people based on their nationality never works. Pretty much all humans are equal. Good apples and bad apples come from every harvest.

Living in Jeddah was fun, the lack of alcohol was not an insurmountable problem, the diving, sailing and golf was pretty good and the social life was most excellent. We had fun and really enjoyed our time and still hold fond memories of KSA and our many Saudi friends.

The nastiness displayed in this thread does not do anyone any favors. Worse still, it makes the profession look pretty low class.

ps... is that old sand golf course (Desert Lakes Golf Club) just north of the airport still there? Please don't tell me its been converted to yet another shopping mall!

Seems like you were in Jeddah pre dinosaur era lucille.
No offense meant, but after centuries of greedily living off of the hard earned money of poor( sometimes very poor )pilgrims coming to Mecca for Haj and, decades of making easy oil money from the taxpayers of the world, all of this must come to an end.
It’s time the hunter became the hunted and the tables were turned.
The free oil tap has now been cut off, the fake tourism in the name of religion into Mecca has been shut down and one of their major free consumers of oil ie Saudia Airlines has been brought to its knees.
If this doesn’t teach the SAUDI Arab a lesson in humanity and its power, then I’m afraid he will only learn when he has to eat sand for breakfast followed by a stiff drink of the now useless crude oil and then a visit to an empty mosque in Mecca.
Combined with stratospheric egos, corruption in their DNA and an unmatched greed for money, this nation settling into the nameless shifting sands vey soon as just another unmarked giant dune is simply inevitable.
Nature strikes back and it’s time to pay !
The price may be too heavy for some I fear.
I however even now pray that they learn to be humane before the hand of allah strikes them their final blow.
Getting bad curses and worse duas from 3-400 expat pilots losing their jobs at a time like this isn’t going to help their cause much I’m afraid.

Es hora de sentir el dolor.

I would agree with that completely Lucifer. In fact many pilots in Saudia are considering international legal action against the airline on grounds of its racist approach towards some pilot communities and issuance of termination letters to some whilst awarding no pay leave to others.
This is a huge tsunami just waiting to engulf the airline now !

Good luck to them . I hope they have lots of cash , laywers love cash . You honestly think they have a case . " fine print "

This has to be the best humour I have read all week. A huge tsunami.... LMAO. As opposed to the near total shut down of the airline?

Termination versus Unpaid Leave appears more to do with fleet type than nationality. I feel for anyone effected, just not seeing a race issue.

You seem to know more than I do obviously. What fleet FCM would be terminated and what fleet put on UPL in your opinion.
Just curious.

IMHO... 330 Guys are an endangered species at the airline, they were not flying much before covid.
320 expats were offered UPL, domestic ops shut down last and will most likely start up first. There was high demand before covid.
777 is a coin toss.

Which compound do the (expat) guys stay? Or is it possible to get the housing allowance?

Saudi City

Housing
 

As far as I know all the expat were transferred to Riyadh in a nice compound called Marvela, even the guys in Jeddah, almost 90% of them, all to Riyadh, I stayed in a Hotel in Jeddah for 1.5 years then the sent me to RUH in Marvela mandatorily.
They tried to offer money instead of accomodation but the process failed because they were offering 400 USD a month only so nobody applied.