I reckon you'd be lucky to take just over 1/2 of that 200K home. Subtract the housing and commuting costs and see what you're left with. Then decide if it suits you. It works for some pilots, and not others. Great thing, this free world we live in. :)

If it really is the starting salary at Qatar, then go for it, you're welcome to it.
It's the same salary as pp34. Anyone who currently joins under the age of 31 (and most do) can achieve it. Whether it is the same salary scale in 30 years time is purely subjective.
How it is taxed is at the behest of the government, not BA.

It's great to have choices.

Aiming High
Got facts to back up a starting pay of £200k or was that a wind up.
There are plenty of easy LH commutes where you don't pay tax or v little.
If Jeremy had got in they'd have needed the 380 on the LIS. 😎

There are several issue with the pay at Qatar (and I talk from experience having spent 3.5 years there). Firstly the housing allowance you will never see they will put you in company accommodation and only pay the allowance if the choose to or need to, if you rent privately 13,000 is not enough so you will be loosing even more of your pay. I have long argued that this is dead money and people have rightly pointed out that if you are considering a like for like comparison then you need to consider UK housing costs. My mortgage costs me £1500 a month here or £18000 a year (far less than to rent a small apartment in Qatar), the difference being my house makes far more than that annually in appreciation, so in effect my house is an investment that does not exist in Qatar (remember non nationals are not allowed to buy property in Qatar)

So forget the housing and you are left with 8700 dollars a month which under current exchange rates is a lot of money, but they are at historic lows! A figure closer to 1.5 or 1.6 dollars to the pound are far more representative of the past decade. At those levels it brings your take home closer to £5000 a month, which was about what I was making. Now 5k a month is only slightly more than most BA FOs are making and the difference in living conditions are beyond comparison. To put it nicely Qatar is a boiling hot hell hole full of desperate and greedy individuals, it is an incredibly unpleasant place to live and 6k a month is not even close to a worth while amount.

The head line figures look very appealing but dig a little deeper and remove post Brexit exchange rates and actually things are not so great.

Good luck at Qatar - there are plenty of threads in the ME section, but this one is about BA.
As my Mother used to say "don't come crying to me". No whining when you get to Qatar, ok?!

Aiming High
Ok you meant £200k equivalent with a bit of reversed maths.
Fair enough best of luck I've only spent an hour there.

haha. the exact same could be said for London!

We have shops and electricity now. :ok:

Running water in my village!

Think of all that extra flight pay at Qatar as you have to fly round the ME region just to get in and out ;-)

Maybe your mother should have taught you to come across as a bit less of a :mad: ? This chap/chap-ess is discussing the pros and cons of BA Direct Entry from their background and experience. And in the vacuum of new developments in the recruitment department, only punctuated by meager speculation here, I can't see it being a bad thing. Meanwhile, feel free to add some useful info of your own instead of using "good luck" as a placeholder for some other less pleasant sentiment.

Anyone heard anymore about internal bids?

The window for the internal bidding process only closed a couple of weeks back, the collated bids are available to those in house so they can make sure their preferences have been correctly recorded.. Once that's been done (end of this month) it will then be down to the long suffering/hard working lady who organisies all this to crunch the numbers, no doubt after umpteen inputs from network planning, etc

Last time I looked the results weren't due to be published until November...sorry if that wasn't the timescale you were hoping for.

You can feel free to be less pessimistic about what people mean when expressing sentiments on an online forum. FWIW, I actually meant it... But then again, this is PPRuNE, perhaps I should add "for real" after I say anything nice. The point I am making is that PPRuNE is full of people who seek advice/validation/whatever about going to the ME. They never listen (I am guilty as charged) and are invariably back to complain about it. I would say that was something useful to consider.

Anyone in the pool has recevid details for this online presentation we should be given soon...

Nope nothing yet

I get the feeling we aren't at the top of the priorities list

Are we on any list?!

The one in the bin?

Has anyone managed to ascertain what our actual time in the pool is now? I.e - the original year + 6 months + extra year = 2.5 years?

I emailed that question the day we got the email with no reply.

I wonder how many in the hold pool will just see this as a non starter now and either look at other airlines or stay for upgrades at current one.

No DEP for the longhaul side or internal moves only?

Clearly why they are forecasting no DEP recruitment next year. Cadets are cheaper - they come without experience!

The bottleneck will be the training department, it may get to a point where they can't cope with getting 150+ newbies onto the line, which is where rated guys & gals near the top of the pool list may be in luck.

I think things are looking bleak for our non-rated friends though...

Things change very quickly at BA. The latest flying programme snapshot will be published at the end of September. Already 2018 is being talked of as a "busy time" for pilot recruitment, so I would be cautiously optimistic. Good luck all...

"A busy time for recruitment..,"

Yep, they've got 150-odd fATPL cadets to administer.

There are so many unknowns at the moment I'm not sure there is any way anybody can offer meaningful predictions...

Yes there's the fleet plan coming up, but there's also the result of the internal move bid, and yes there are a significant number of FPPs waiting in the wings...

On one extreme if in November we find out all the existing Airbus pilots have opted to remain on the short haul fleet then the company might well be visiting the hold pool to find experienced pilots to fill long haul positions.....odds on that extreme event happening is, I suspect , between zero and nil....

If OTOH the long haul slots can be filled by internal movement and there is training capacity to backfill those short haul vacancies with the FPPs then many hold poolers are going to be dissapointed because the company will use the FPPs for the reasons previously mentioned.

The picture might be clearer after the results of the internal bid are known, which AFAIK is not until November...

All I can say is good luck.

Busy year for recruitment, no DEP next year, lots of DEP next year, FPP only, SSP cadets, huge amounts of training next year for LH expansion, not enough SH pilots who are unfrozen to fill LH roles, commands gone senior on SH, commands gone junior on SH, A350 not coming, A350s are coming.......777X. I think I have heard all of that in the last few weeks. I don't think anyone knows really and those that do really don't share the information with people in dark corners of the crew room........saying that dark corners of the crew room are full of surprises 😎

Its impossible to predict anything in aviation, just be ready to take advantage of any opportunities that interest you. In my time I've seen people predict zero recruitment only to have the busiest year ever or commands are 20 years away then suddenly pilots with 2 years in the airline are on command courses. It could happen that the pilots over 55 suddenly decide to retire and enjoy their health and wealth, or a Korean war could end recruitment for years and throw everything in to chaos.

Here you go

our plan is to carry a small surplus into 2018 predominantly to ease the transition to JSS. Given the complexities of our agreements and the long timescales for pilot recruitment, after a hiatus in recruitment over the summer period, we are looking forward to welcoming the final tranche of FPP graduates over the next few months before recommending external recruitment in earnest in the New Year. We have enjoyed a recuperative year in 2017 and, though we will not complete the detailed work on our 2018 financial plan until October, we can be confident that the next 12 months will be a busy time both within the operation and for pilot recruitment.

Does "external recruitment" mean / include the CTC / OAA cadets (not FPP) that they are sourcing, or do they mean DEP?

Just a health warning about that statement bex: about two months back it's author attended a SEP forum and told the assembled bunch of flight crew about forthcoming plans, mix of DEPs and FPPs he expected to see, and roughly when. Two weeks later the plan had all changed, and since I had paraphrased the SEP forum comments here I was left a tad red faced.

I don't doubt the author is telling it as he sees it today but whilst he is very very highly placed in the Flight Ops food chain we know commercial are well capable of springing surprises. Whilst the statement is better than an information vacuum I'd still add a note of caution until we see in print both the results of the Fleet plan and then Cassandra (internal bid process ) results.

Wise words as always Wiggy.

Oh I dunno bex, in a month or so it's quite possible we will discover I've been talking out of my **** again.....

It would be nice to give the swimmer some definite good news.....

Anyhow, back to the annual quiz..:sad:

I have a feeling that once JSS is in place we won't need as many pilots as before, FPP or DE.

...Or on the other hand, maybe BA will; when most of the senior crystallized pension guys leave in disgust over not being able to tailor their life anymore in the way they were used to with bidline.

Some might go but TBH I think the amount of tailoring currently available simply through "basic" bidline and picking lines at Stage one and juicy trips at Stage two is overstated, trip swapping was a better weapon. Yes the Page one pilots can almost tailor things but below that vaunted position you quickly run into compromise territory.

Anyhow I see debate has kicked off again elsewhere as to what will actually happen when JSS is introduced. Some suspect the senior guys will "suffer", others think with JSS all the carp will drop through to the junior rosters. I think we will only which way things are going to go when we see JSS and the effect of it's much anticipated inhibitors in action.

It may be a way off yet anyway. The word on the street is that JSS is delayed at least 6 months with the development budget being heavily scrutinised by the Waterworld Accountants.

Who knows. :hmm:

dropping down to the bottom? No change there then.

More to the point you can't say BA does not have a sense of humour. Every year it's the same......50 questions on the tech quiz and the last one or two are always about fatigue

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41193122

Is this true for flight deck as well ?