4P's, either SGN or HAN. Amazing pizza, said by 99.999% of the Italians I've met here.

It's not a matter of pizza I would like to talk with an Italian about the life in Ho Chi Minh city, I'm not a pilot I'm an engineer

Got the mail about the 350? Great deal isn’t it? 35K + 20K bond, sweet ...

Please remember that it will be a “For Vietnam Airlines Only” Type... 🤦🏼*♂️
Also, it seems that some sort of seniority system is in place (first to pay 7-10k under the table to the fleet chief will be “considered”)...
Word of wisdom: If you wish to do your initial A350 with quality, do it NOW; you’ll be trained by pro’s in France; don’t wait until the Type is trained in Saigon with local instructors...

So how is it really now and the next 5 years
 

Hi guys!!

Wow!! What a lot of pages to go through and what a lot of different stories!!

So how is it really now and the next 5 years??!!

I am a ‘settled’ Cpt A320c in Europe and considering a move into Asia and therefor contracting pilot.
(Due to wife needing a tropical climat physically and also looking for a new challenge myself as I am getting bored with the job here).

Any Dutch guys out here??

Thanks everyone already for more up2date experiences and looking forward for advise and info!! (Good or if bad, advise to where to go instead)!

Jeez if you don’t wanna kill yourself, don’t come. Roster on the 320 is getting tougher by the day. No mercy on your standbys and schedule changes almost everyday either by retime or different sectors. The Chinese charters will be increasing in the near future. If you’re gonna be doing Chinese sectors, you might as well be flying for the Chinese for double the pay. Not worth the effort here. Guys are leaving on a monthly basis. And the fat bitch in the roster will keep on changing your vacations because they don’t enough people.

If you’re interested in full time, living year round, I’d suggest VietJet or JetStar, I hear they pay a lot better than VNA; VNA has a few better schedule perks, they will ship you confirmed on your vacation to Europe; but that is about it.
VNA will bond you for one month salary if you intent to leave early, but the training they give is a almost joke; can’t comment on VJ and JS.
Looking into the crystal ball: overall a lot of Expats are not happy with what they see; there is a fairly big demand for Captains in the A321, upgrade to Line Training Pilot will be very quick (if you volunteer, something a lot don’t want as it’s high risk and only $800 more) but VNA is not interested in increasing the pay, so you’ll be flying with quite a few interesting characters...
Another note: You could also become one of the A350 carrot chasers... 🤦🏼*♂️

The Good
-Out of the three options in Vietnam, VNA is probably the best overall
-Good chances of getting your 5 year contract respected
-Working atmosphere is quite relaxed, as long as you’re a “standard pilot” and follow SOPs, you’ll stay out of trouble
-Quite reasonable food served on every sector, so generally no need to worry about taking your lunch to work
-If your plan is to commute, they have decent working rosters available and a business seat on their network to catch a flight to wherever you’re heading to.
-If your base is Hanoi, and live in Tay Ho, a 25 minute -traffic free- ride on taxi or bus will get you to the airport.
-Vietnam is not cheap, but also not as expensive as other cities where we have options to work at
-Vietnam is safe -low crime rate- and with a proper mindset, also a cool place to live in
-Locals are generally nice guys to fly with, specially the recently released

The Bad
-Workload has increased lately. Safety Exterior Inspection, Preliminary Cockpit Inspection and Exterior Walkaround are always perfomed by CM1. Additional to that, checking/filling the logbook, signing multiple forms before flight, briefing the cabin crew and performing the emergency intercommunication system check adds to your cockpit preparation and briefing if you’re PF. Transit checks/refueling is now being implemented on various destinations, so you can also add that. Expect multiple change of aircrafts, so be prepared to do again everything mentioned above, once again on every change of aircraft. It gets to you, believe me...
-If weather is ****ty, you’ll do the flying, FOs are not allowed to do so when Xwind exceeds 15k and/or raining.
-FO’s practically only program the MCDU and fly when weather is CAVOK, Captains do everything else.
-If the weather is ****ty (again) you’ll also might have your last minute change of service. Local Captains don’t like to fly into wx and will call roster to fly anywhere else with better wx
-Unless you are wiling to pay 35k + a 20k bond, the upgrade to the 350 is out of the question
-Not the place to plan to be for more than 5 years, locals will eventually fill in the spots
-Pollution in Hanoi can get severe, traffic in Saigon is insane
-Out of the three options available in Vietnam, VNA is the lowest paid
-If you are considering moving with your family, bear in mind that schools are pretty expensive. One kid-ok, two-maybe, three, head to Qatar

The Ugly
-Weather in summer, it gets nasty, expect +TSRA everyday

My point of view, hope it helps... ;-)

I just received email from Rishworth advertising for VN:

"Annual fee increase of 2% from the completion of 3 - 10 years’ service. "

That's a whopping 0.5% pay "increase" for the first 4 years in a country that's historically rarely had lower than 5% consumer price inflation.

Enjoy!

CP

Yeah; it’s a joke... things here in Saigon are not cheap, nor is a live to live here by any standard; worse if you have kids; schooling is big business here and VERY expensive! And what colleagues are telling me is that Hanoi is already just as bad and Da Nang is even worse!

I agree with Pezet on almost everything that is in his cons but only a few things on his Pro’s and I would like to point out a few things: I’m sorry, but we do not trust the local FO’s; that’s why critical items are now Captains respinsabilities; they have demonstrated over and over that they are not capable of managing ADM, sound judgement or even basic flying skills! If you let them be PF, even on an easy day, be VERY aware that they can and will surprise you with some very weired stuff, and on top are VERY defensive when you try to tell them what they did wrong!
They also know very well that they have almost ZERO liability when flying with Expats. You are a completely burnable asset to management and their kids if it helps them to save face! And things are not getting better here!
This is a “do not report” culture; you are strongly discouraged, as i was explained by Instructors, to send any kind of inform to management, be it about safety issues or simply trying to protect your own back from repercussions of something someone else did. The office environment towards Expats is very different and the operating environment, when flying with Vietnamese Pilots, feels almost hostile as they do not appreciate you being here; they do make it clear that you should not be here...
The truth is: Many Western Expats were promised a lot more and are very disappointed and looking for greener pastures. Choose wisely if you consider coming to VNA!

Flying in Asia Pacific Region is simple. You have more advantage if you belong to an Asian culture in which you internalized from childhood that much respect is given to the "elders" or "patriarchal" type of organization. Much more to authority figures.

Try to be RACIST and DISRESPECT the LOCAL CULTURE and your name will be immediately submitted to CAA for your next License validation.

"If you are in Rome, do what the Romans do." Otherwise, do not attempt to go to Rome. Try to learn the history of Westerners who were booted out for this mistake due to arrogance and racist treatment of locals. You can learn a lot for there were many of them.

There are Western nationalities that are banned from joining reputable Asian Airlines due to long history of Racial Discrimination among Asians.

I hope that you are not among these Western nations coz' you still have a job at the moment. Or rather you already started to learn how to RESPECT.

Otherwise, you are also be leaving pretty much soon.

Just my two cents

Maybe little off topic but......Dear Arigato, you are talking about “respect” of the Elders......”Patriarchal” society........is the same colture and attitude that lead to Airlines like Korean or similar to MUST have Expat pilots to be accepted to fly anywhere in the world? Colture that applied to a Cockpit lead to a situation where if the Captain is about to crash on a hill the FO rispectfully remain silent to respect the elder? (Again as far as I remeber Korean is a golden example).
Are you sure that we westerner are always racist when we complaying about something or we criticize something?
Are those “Elders” humble enough to accept and at least consider others opinion?
I don’t mean to attack you or criticize your colture (i spent many years in middle east and my wife is asian) and I also know that many times many of our collegues have BIG ego problems pretending to be the best and to teach everything to everybody but sometimes it seems that you guys are STUCK in your point of view/colture/tradition and who came with a different mindset is just “racist”......that's it!
If you go in Rome do as the Romans for sure, but if the Romans needs you they must be open to at least understand you!
Is a mutual agreement.....
Just my consideration......
Cheers

Just got an email from an agency; Vietjet on 6x2, 3x1 roster, up to 14k, you’ll never make that amount here...

You wont make it there either. Unless you pay rostering for the good earning flights and fly max hours and duty and take all the roster disruption.

You also have to pay for your own tickets home. We get free upgradeable tickets. Add up what thats worth.

Also on a 2 week off month you will get a very small salary. Look at the overall year.

And definitely you gotta fly your ass off to earn those 14k...

How did this become a racial and respect discussion?

Behold VietJet Add
 

I was going to reply to this as well; beware of this VietJet add; I know of quite a few Expats who are actually trying to leave VJ for VNA. The guys upstairs are actually quite right about a few things: VNA has its perks in comparison to VJ and JS.

Dear EAgle, no worries. I don’t mean turn this into a racial discussion, mine was just an observation about what Arigato wrote....

It's generally well known how the bottomfeeders at VJ make those 14k paychecks on some months...:rolleyes:

All of the airlines mentioned are more or less tarred with the same brush (from a local management perspective) and unfortunately if you want to fly in Vietnam the reality is that you just have to play their game.

You WILL pay somebody something for a job / promotion etc... Cash is preferred.

As far as Asia is concerned it's actually not a bad place to live. Most things are pretty accessible (western food / internet etc) and The locals are generally really nice, peaceful people. :ok:

How to survive the pilots chain smoking on Vietnam Airlines cockpits?
brand new A350s cockpit ruined, and can be smelled from business class the entire flight.