Aggghhhhhhhhh!

What do you guys not understand????? Its nothing to do with what the average, whos calculations are right or wrong! The fact is you effectively get paid for 10 months work per year! If you are flying less than average on a constant basis where is the 'extra' as you say avaiable to bank if you outgoings are fixed and your income is variable and the majority of the time decreasing????

The whole point is there is no fairness in the system!! Why should the guy who gets in the seat after me earn a third more as his name is just because his name is alphabetically before mine!

So if you have the answers and as you clearly keep pointing out, can divide things by 12, why are some guys doing 3 standbys a week with 12hrs flying and others doing 30hrs no standby and above average on hours for the time of year??

Even doing 40 hours is roughly 3600euro before tax, if we applied to Jet2, we would get much less than what people are complaining about here.

I believe they were offering something like £1800pm (2200e).

Basic and guaranteed? Would be nice, could plan a little better! Still nice to see everyone is still avoiding the question regarding our Rostering system. Seniority apparently dosent exist yet it's the same guys out of base, same guys 70+ hrs per month!

The Ryanair rostering system is designed to man all flights at the lowest possible cost to the company. This is why there seems to be no logical distribution behind your roster.

Another reason why UK based pilots are not flying as much is because the market in the UK is currently saturated. Ryanair has a disproportionate amount of bases in the UK compared to other countries. There is too much passenger overlap.

To give an example. At my base in central Europe we have a passenger overlap range of roughly 350km total travel distance. This means that through airport surveys Ryanair has established that the majority of its' passengers at my base live within that distance of the airport. This equates to roughly 200 miles. Outside that radius, a passenger is more likely to choose another Ryanair base over mine as the departure point of his travels. I have these figures from by base captain, so they should be more or less accurate.

When you transmute those figures to the UK you'll see where the problem lies. All the major UK bases (Stansted, Luton, Bristol, Birmingham, East-Midlands, Leeds) are positioned on average less than 150 miles from each other.

In the UK, you have 6 bases in the passenger overlap radius equal to that of just 1 central European base. Add to that the fact that Stansted has a much larger passenger attraction rate because of the larger spectrum in available destinations. In short, the competition for passengers between UK bases in much larger than the competition for passengers in central Europe.

In my base, you'll get 1 standby per week normally. Can't speak for FO's, but captains keep averaging around 75 up to 90 hours per 28 days. From FO's I hear variable numbers, but not as low as I've read here. I would say average around 55 per month for the youngsters.

I feel for the guys flying 40 hours or less. I hope my post gives some insight in the reasons behind it.

Again, I agree that it is a bit frustrating that we are having 100 hour months during the summer and 30 in the winter and sometimes it feels like everyone else gets to fly more. However, I compared hours with a colleague that was complaining he got less than everyone else. As it turned out it only differed 10-20 hours between us when we factored in the fact that he had had his month off and mine was coming up.

Also, if you insist on having your month off and ad hoc days during summer when the production is higher, I don´t think you can expect to get the same amount of hours over the year as if you take a hike in January.

Take your 600 or so hours and divide by 12 (yes 12), multiply with your hourly rate and any currency conversion and you will get your average per month. Any more money that shows up in your account around the 12th should be set aside to cover for the month without any pay and the months with reduced pay. I agree with Kempus that if you never reach the expected average per month that would be a bit of a problem, but I don´t think anyone get´s less than 600/year. You cannot expect to get 750-800 anymore, at least not in a training base, perhaps in a place like KUN or so...

Unless you're with McNamara in which case you can pick random numbers as that's what they seem to do.

Anyone in the UK looking for hours, get you're hands on one of these "company IDs" and you can go to BCN and the likes for some extra hours!

Anyone know how much flying a FO can expect from BCN, MAD or AGP?
Any information will be greatly appreciated!

Quote - Lord Spandex Masher, your a CUN*! your the kind of CUN* that believes he was born to fly, I'll bet you believe you could teach birds to fly, -Unquote


Wow, that's a really useful contribution to the debate :rolleyes:

Quote - Lord Spandex Masher, your a CUN*! your the kind of CUN* that believes he was born to fly, I'll bet you believe you could teach birds to fly, -Unquote


Perhaps Get_a_Grip if you asked Lord Spandex Masher nicely he could also teach you some grammar while he's at it, with "his" CUN* :rolleyes:

My first post as a member of the grammar police....but really if you're going to stoop to such crass statements on here and bring down the tone of the discussion, then at the very least get it right. :ugh:

Get_a_Grip: repeat after me....

You're a CUN*

He's a CUN*

I'm a CUN*

We're all CUN*s

Your mums......enough said?



Back to topic....

Kempus: are guys at the same base as you on vastly different hours? Are they on the same contract as you? And have you asked about why there's a discrepancy?

Isn't it all quite fascinating?

Not long ago there was a huge hue and cry going on pprune that Ryanair were fiddliing the books so that their pilots were having to fly more than 900 hours in a calendar year, but by some Irish fiddle (excuse pun) "everything got put right by magic on April 1st".

Suddenly, some of them are flying less than the poor chaps in BA!

I have seen and done all of this before.

For example, when I worked in the US of A in the 1980s for a Part 121 operator, I got paid by the hour and had a 50-hour guaranteed month. Anything above that was good news. In fact, a 100 hour month was wonderful. (A 120 hour month was possible under FAA regulations).

However, being a practical soul, I already figured that I was not likely to do 100 hours per month every month of the year, so I did some sensible accountancy and put some of the good months towards what were likely to be the bad months.

Not only that; the company that I worked for in the US of A, did not have a pension scheme or anything else for that matter, so I put a proportion of what I earned in the US of A into a UK pension fund and it has rewarded me handsomly.

It is called the principle of the 6 Ps.

"Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance".

I wonder if the good people from HMRC are reading this! They must be pissing themselves if they are with the easy pickings coming up!

"Tell me mr self employed ryr pilot why didn't you earn any money last month"

"Coz I was sitting around on unpaid standby somewhere in europe"

"why didn't you just come home and fly for someone else then, or do another job"

"Coz I can't, my contract says I can't"

"Aaaah, I see, now let me have a look, 4 years at 80 euros per hour times 700 hours a year, at Paye rates, including the employers national insurance of course, plus 4 years of late fines, plus interest....Thats quite a tidy sum you owe her majesty sir. Cheque by the end of the week will be fine, if not, you know where the local court is don't you sir"

Whilst I pity anyone in your boat, reap what you sew is an apt description, and surely anyone who went into the glorious cadet 'pay for everything' scheme must have seen this as a natural conclusion?

Mugabellew was on the flightdeck of my flight to STN - and we asked him about the hours issue. He said that he was driving the "optimiser" software to get all pilots - Ryanair and contract - within 5% of each other - when annual leave was factored per month.

I did not understand how he could do this but he said that he had a statistician working weekly producing reports by base by rank and employer. Each base was then manually adjusted on the roster and inspected to ensure that all pilots would converge. I asked how could this work with more than 2500 pilots.

He booted up his laptop (non SOP on the flightdeck I know) and showed both of us the live data. Uncanny the lowest and highest in STN were within 6%. He said to drive this on that in some bases it means that some will have markedly more flying than others to bring them into the statistical band.

He referred me to a book called "fooled by randomness" and claimed that airline flights operations and rostering were the ultimate wonder of game theory. As he tried to explain a "polar aerograph" to me displaying hours by base - I pretended to have an RT call to make.

757 Driver - I'm not really sure how HMRC would enforce something like that. I work as a contractor because Brookfield/RYR let me do so and provide no other way of working for them. I pay an accountant and he sees to it that I remain within the law and pay the tax (Corporation, Income, Capital Gains and VAT) I owe. I do not have an option to go onto PAYE.
If, by HMRC rules, I should be an employee (which is debatable), then that would be a matter for HMRC to take up with Brookfield, not me, surely? I've already paid the tax under the system of work that I find myself in.

Funny, I left FR last spring wanting to get as many hours per schedule as possible. Now each time it comes i hope for as little flying as possible. Now i average about 450 hours a year and loving it. Leave that "airline" and get a life/real job!:ugh:

Kempus

Divide by 12! lol

I have a car, 2 in fact, loan repayment for type rating, own MY own house (by myself), Commute to Spain, pay €500 euro a month here, have a contract mobile, a previous loan also for house upgrades, car insurance road tax, and a fairly good lifestyle, go out to dinner most nights at home and a beer when I want and take the odd couple of days away places to romance the ladies, and still don't sit and moan on here about the money,

DIVIDE by 12, I did 85 hours last month, looking at 55 this month, guess what, not spending all last months money this month, keeping some in the bank to top up next month, the 90+ hours in summer with out of base pay were great, cookies in the cupboard now, yes the hours are not averaged out, theres a lot of pilots and recon its just too much extra work for rostering to bother even trying, would just cost more man hours to try and do it.

I don't believe what a previous poster said about its worked for the least possible cost in the flight deck, I have often flown as a higher rate f/o while new cheap guys are on standby.

Anyway, there is no guarantee of hours, I knew that starting, you knew that too! you cant moan after, no one made any promise, you just hoped to fly 900 hours a year, I on the other hand do not want too, 700-750 a year would suit me fine.

757 Driver

I did the latest HMRC employment status indicator and answered the questions as though a Brookfield pilot. This was the result:

Employment Status Indicator Result
Based on the information you have provided, the worker is self-employed.

The result is based on the following grounds:

Version: 1.3.0.2
The worker is self-employed. [Why ?]
There is a low indication of substitution. [Why ?]
There is a high indication of financial risk. [Why ?]
Printer-friendly version

Paye therefore is not applicable.
If you want to try it yourself just google HMRC self employment rules.

As much as it will annoy a lot of us who suspect the chips are stacked against us individually, I suspect if we reconvene on April 1st (no joke intended), and compare hours for the RYR rostering year, I bet we will all fall into a pretty tight band.

Wally.

PS. I flew 32 hours last November, and 97 this November - go figure!

Are you based in Spain? If so at which base? And do you have any information how much flying on average one can expect from the spanish bases?
thx

Sellect,

There appears to be no way to give an accurate answer to your question, if I were able to predict hours in bases I would bottle and sell it!!

I guess the common sense view is to look at what happens at the base and make an intelligent guess. If the base has a reduction of a/c over the winter you will likely find it overcrewed and hence a lot of standbys. If you are in the UK, the bases seems to have a slightly more seasonally adjusted utilisation of aircraft and this will affect hours.

A year ago F/O's seem content to say they got around 750hrs/yr. Someone above said 600-650hrs. My experience (me and friends around the network) would probably split the difference and say you can pretty much guarantee 700hrs from April 1st-March 31st each year, although the bad months can be really bad (see Nick14's comment).

Wally.

My gripe isn't with the money side, I've got a good car, city centre flat and budget well. I was sold by the idea of high hours, hours badly needed to get the opportunity to apply for command before the current cutoff at the end of 2012.

Lisline tells me I've done 535 actual hours this flying year, expecting 550 by the end of the month.

I did 735 hours last year so would seem that I need to average around 62 hours for the last 3 months to make that. Chances of achieving it......slim.

Have seen plenty of new fo's recently, some transferred from other bases, others were training here and then probably for ease, just stayed here.

One lad transferred from Madrid and was told by Big D in Stansted that he can move but Edinburgh is already over crewed.

Don't see the sense in that when guys are doing out of base in Madrid!:ugh:

I'm led to believe RYR work on 5.2 crews per aircraft so that should see us with 31 fo's plus any extra training, we are actually on around 38!

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand how lucky I am to be UK based, and I only got it because the base was expanding, but I see no point in saturating the base when no expansion is occurring.

FR wants to make money with the cadets ! Guess whom is in excess ?

Anyone get the feeling they are recruiting in excess deliberately to make sure that if guys do leave they have enough spare. Also to make money on the type rating etc.

I think I will apply for December off next year to keep the worst months as holiday.

Studi

Nearly right, medicals and car park are not deducted by the company and made a profit on as we do them ourselfs, I use my own AME and pay him directly,
as for car parking, dont need one based here.

Hi all,

My 2 cents worth.

I am an f/o at a smallish base, 6 a/c, and for me the issue is not the usual reduction over the winter months, which is understandable, but the way Fr use cost cutting at our expense.
In the Autumn they announced a 30% reduction in the winter schedule (to reduce costs) compared to last year, so I guess 30% less cash for us on top of that 5 new cadets arrived in the Autumn. This has meant a drastic reduction in flight for the based f/o's, most f/o's here are doing no more that 30hours, last month I had all of 4 flying days. This is simply not acceptable, I have been with the company for almost 4 years, without a pay rise (excluding hourly incremental increases as per contract), while the company has been making big mulas.
My contract also states 4 sbys per 28 days, this is almost never honoured.
I did 680 hours last year, and it looks like it will be less this year due to Fr's cost cutting. I pay my taxes and have a family with 2 kids to support, so the lack of income is a serious issue.
So all this talk about bumper summers and lean winters is all well and good, but when the company can reduce your livelihood at a whim of management, the buck stops there.
I for one am not interested in working here any more, I have sent out applications and hope for a positive outcome. As appealing as the command upgrade might be, I have had enough of this company's greed and disregard for its employees, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one.
The bottom line is they don't look after us, and hence don't deserve our services, take them elsewhere.

Lets all be honest, a company that has 3 billion+ in the bank and decides 2 years ago to cut off its contribution to staff xmas party's..... something's not right upstairs.

rant over

all the best

Goose

"My contract also states 4 sbys per 28 days, this is almost never honoured."

SkyGoose, read again, it is not exactly in the contract, it is Guidelines !! With a wording stating it is then not guaranteed...:sad:

Like you, I am more and more upset with the company, my point is that 2 years ago you could find people happy to work here who could help you see the bright side. Today, I do not find anybody happy here anymore so we are 2 bitching guys in the flightdeck almost everyday...

:O Please guys , Don't feel sorry for me. Nov/ Dec = 25 hours per month, over 4/5 days. the rest standby. absolutely brilliant. feet up, beer in one hand. time to live. I get depresseed thinking of the summer season :O:O:O

Well were all glad that you can afford to think like that. I think it's fair to say that this thread is not really aimed at those in your situation.

EK

I agree with pilot999. Happy days. Its great not to have to go fly around in this crap weather.

And EK4457, first officers always complain about not flying enough regardless of the airline. I complained myself. All the FO's at my base also complain about lean winters, but it still doesnt stop them from buying fancy new cars. Mmm, theres always something about FO's and cars.

I understand why they dont want you flying for someone else, but your contract surely doesnt state that you cannot engage in ANY other work outside of RYR! Does it? :eek:

As your hours seem to be continuously reducing, you will presumably reach a point where you can no longer pay the winter bills. So its not just OAP grans wrapped in an auld tartan shaul, in front of the fire with only 'one bar' .... its OAT grads too).

So I presume you would either have to find part time work when on standby (if your contract allows) or leave RYR altogether?

The shortage of other flying jobs means that RYR hold all the aces (:) pun intended)

Having previously done the 8oo hours routine upto the end of December. Winter at 25 hours a month is far better.sector pay drops off, but I allow or budget for this over a year.

:D
Also the 737 goes faster than those cars as well, handling on corners is a bit iffy. and certainly wont handle the Birchanger round about as you try to escape from the airport. I'm more of a White van driver myself.

Sitting in front of the fire with one bar on is a bit extreme. Let's keep it sensible, and not exaggerate.

Most FOs I know on the Brookfield contract do a mimimum of 40 to 50 hours hours in the winter season. With 50 hours that would result in a pay rate for an FO on the higest rate at Brookfield(1500 hours plus) of about 4000 euros before tax. On the starting Brookfield rate after completion of line training it would equate to about 2750 euros before tax.

The problem is a lot of guys live like premiership footballers in the summer and then start whinging in the winter. There are exceptions where guys and girls do get less hours than stated but from my experience, it is rare.

go around, pilot999 and lax,

My point is that the income can be reduced, as per my case, to around 30 hours or less, at the whim of rostering, or an Icelandic volcano.
I dont have fancy cars or live like a fotballer in the summer, and still need around 50 hours in the winter to live an average 'pilots' lifestyle. If your happy with no pay increase in 4 years, while the boss has more than he can spend, good for you.

I myself feel its time to move on.

Still like the equipment and colleagues but the other stuff is seriously sullying my experience...

Mind if I break down your post get a grip? I'll ignore the basic spelling and grammatical errors as they are obvious to everyone.

your a CUN*! - Yes, I am.

your the kind of CUN* that believes he was born to fly - No, but I never believed that I had to pay for it and so far I haven't.

I'll bet you believe you could teach birds to fly - It's not difficult at all. You just kick them up the arse and they start flapping. Bit like you really.

Do Ryanair allow kids with ASBO's to fly for them?

lmao, kick them up the a$$ and they start flapping hahahahaha

Well, after optimistically joining Ryanair last year I am now looking for work elsewhere. Over the past 3 months I have averaged less than 30 hours per month as a Captain. To me this is completely unacceptable. I know you should look at this as an average over a one year period, but I was told to expect to fly 850 hours per year. I will fall way short of this figure. I have always maintained Ryanair could be a great company, but when you start messing with the only two thing that really keep Captains working there, money and roster, people will start to walk. I have 10 close friends in Ryanair, all Captains, everyone of them is now looking for work elsewhere. Does Ryanair management know something we don't, do they have a secret ace up there sleeve? I am completely perplexed as to where they are going to get Captains from next year. I have heard from reliable sources that they are already short for summer 2011.
Its a shame really. Good aircraft, good training department, good routes, terrible money!

Bob where are you from and where are you based?

Perhaps I don't need to know that, but if you're based at home, they know this and, being english like myself based in spain since I joined two years ago, I've done 1700 hrs on type so far. This does average 850 a year, but I'm not at home either.

Most people I know do less hours when they're based in the UK or IRE, and it seems the majority of Brits and Irish want to be based at home.

AIMINGHIGH123 - did it cost you 65-100k in training before you could do your job? No? Well that's why you don't get paid the same.

It's all risk-reward.

Once you have outlayed a large amount of money, you expect to be able to earn it back within a reasonable time-scale.

Don't forget to add in circa €30k if you want to get a job at Ryanair (and there are not many alternatives at the moment for fresh grads)

hear hear aiminghigh, i agree with you
yes it will cost 30000 grand for a type rating my understanding thats its tax deductable . a benefit of forming a company with brookfield , also are these companies formed in ireland , correct me if i am wrong is the tax rate 13 percent and your not paying the higher rates .
one of previous posters expects to be treated as paye with benefits of self employed company director in these brookfield companies