No host is taken out after tax. Most have switched to revolut these days.

Surely down route expenses are tax deductible?

..and that is reflected in the way the "allowances" element of pay ( or more correctly the Time Away From Base - TAFB, payment) is taxed..

Each trip attracts an amount of money based on the time away from base.

By agreement with HMRC a percentage of TAFB payment is not subject to tax - the percentage is based on what HMRC think is a credible down route spend on food. The percentage is not calculated on an individual basis, it's a "blanket" figure and is based on evidence from audits (see last para).

HMRC tax the remaining percentage of TAFB as if it is income.

HMRC monitor the spend by running regular audits where they ask, well demand, that selected crew members produce receipts for their spend down route..their aim being no doubt to increase the percentage of the time away from base payment that is taxed as income.

Full time contract it's 28 days leave per year..14 days to be taken in the summer season ( roughly April through start October), 14 days in the Winter. In the season it has to be taken as either a single 14 day block or two 7 day blocks...it cannot be spilt or broken down any further.

Before and/or after the leave block(s) - depending on whether it's a two week block or a pair of separated one week blocks you get buffer or "wrap" days (3 ?) where you cannot be forced to work but you may choose to do so (and there might be reasons for doing so but they are probably beyond the scope of this reply..)

Also you get two 7 day Duty Free Weeks (DFW), one week in the Summer season , one in winter, (plus effectively an optional "wrap" type day at the start of the DFW...you can choose to work in any of the days of DFW.)

6 Golden days per calendar year.


So if I’m reading the above right :rolleyes:, you could get 6 months of the year where you have between 8-10 days off consecutively, if you break up your leave and DFW. Then you could use your golden days to book at least one Saturday off for each of the other 6 months? If that’s the case it seems pretty reasonable, and negates a lot of the stuff above about new joiners having little/no control over weekends etc......

That's one for the new joiners to answer.

Meanwhile I'll merely note that you can't always get leave/DFW where you want it (limited number of "slots" for each week, and it's allocated based on a points accrued system).

One gripe about Golden Days is that there is no protection from a very late finish night before one or an early AM report the day after one, but, yes you could protect a weekend if you took a pair of GDs together - which is allowable..

Flys4Funs - Yes, you are essentially correct. In the Summer 3 of the months can have 8, 10 and 11 days off consecutively; the winter three of them can have 9, 10 and 11. Golden days can easily be booked to achieve a weekend day off in the 6 remaining months if required.

Breakdown for clarity:
Summer - 10 day block (7 leave + 3 wrap days), 11 day block (7 leave + 4 wrap days), 8 day block (Duty Free week plus one ‘non-assignable’ day).

Winter - Same 10 and 11 day blocks, Duty Free week is now 9 days instead of 8 (agreed in the recent pay settlement).

The only caveat is that leave is bid for on a ‘points’ basis. If you take unpopular weeks (mid-November, say) these are worth about 6 points and Christmas week is worth 1 point. Your points total over a rolling 4-years is then used to decide who gets first pick of leave next time around. It’s a fair system which means everybody gets a reasonable crack at having popular time off, summer holidays for instance. What it does mean in practice is that new-joiners won’t necessarily have first choice leave straight away.

For completeness, LGW system is very similar except that all six leave and duty free blocks are 10 days long including wraps, and the golden days are called ‘trump days’ which can be taken in six pairs rather than six individual days off; therefore a whole weekend off can easily be achieved in every month of the year if desired (if not more than one during the quiet winter).

Im a year in, direct onto LH. I can't complain about weekend working so far. .. just lucky I guess, I don't normally bid home on the weekends, but JSS often gives me some weekend days off (though I worry what's happening higher up the list to the pilots who can't get those days off due to global constraints. ......)

Also, as a junior pilot you can have some luck with weekends by bidding for reserve. .. as the 7 days off prior to reserve cover a weekend.

Thanks for clarifying - very interesting.

I had another question on Dupre’s reserve point - if you bid reserve, you get an additional week up front - I guess you can’t bid reserve and take a leave period in the same month - i.e. get the seven days off for reserve and another 8/11 days off?

How does the reserve work, you get allocated a time slot and are on two hours notice for that period. Is this for the entire rest of the month (7 days a week) after your first week off?

If there is more than a certain amount of preexisting credit (e.g. due to leave, sims, etc) in the 4 weeks of reserve you are looking to bid for the bid will be invalid, so no, in short you can’t have a standard leave block imbedded in the 3 weeks after the Fixed Days Off.

How it works...(Long haul) you have to be on the end of the phone for three hours every evening to possibly be assigned a duty the next day. That duty might be a trip or it might be a home standby where you are on 2 hours notice (timed from phone call to crew car park at LHR).

1. Yes you can bid for reserve and leave in the same month. They can abut each other too, though it must be leave followed by reserve not the other way around (as you can't put leave on your reserve available days). Doing so comes with a caveat as well - the time zone acclimatisation rules are a bit tighter before reserve so it is not a great option for a holiday to Australia. But if you are staying in Europe it's a good way of getting more time off.

2. Reserve works line this: they can call you up to 8pm for the next day's duty. Can be a flight, a standby or day off. If you are given a standby duty it is either home standby (2hr callout) or airport standby. There are 21 consecutive days of this in your reserve period.

hope that makes some sense!

Feedback on recent BA A320 DEP selection ?
 

Good morning,

Any feedback available on the recent selection process?
Regarding the phase 1, is it still only 3 tests?
- numerical
- verbal
- flight capacity test.

In the past they used to have 2 other tests :
- Flight Director
- Shape test.

Thanks a lot for your answers.

There’s a danger we are going to confuse people here, possibly because a 28 day reserve block can (and usually does) straddle two calendar bidding months. Just rowing it all back a bit to a CliffsNotes version of the relevant bidline rule (JSS version).

A bid for a reserve block will not be accepted if there is any overlap between Leave/DFW days off and any of the 21 available days of the 28 day reserve block..so no you can’t reduce a block down to 14 available days by having a leave in the last week. If you bid for such it will fail.

You can do what want in the Fixed Days off, but as Dupre rightly says you need to acclimatised on the start of the available days.

You can however have up to have to 14 credited hours of preassigned duties embedded in the available days, such as combinations of Golden Days, SEP, Sims....more than 14 hours and a bid for reserve will fail.

Heaven help anyone who has new SOPs, bidding rules, AND a type rating to get to grips with!

We’ve all been there!

Is there any likelihood of recruitment for long haul again onto the 777 or 787? Or is it looking like the way in is through short haul?

I don’t think there is any harm in being aware of what is vaguely possible or impossible, that might swing the decision as to whether to join BA or not, but yes, there’s a danger of TMI. I agree with a comment made upthread about not trying to get your head around bidding until you get on the line....

Yes, that means for the first few months your bids will be a shot in the dark but TBH whether you craft a bid using logic worthy of Alan Turing or just stick a pin in a few bid commands/toss a coin chances are due juniority results will probably be the same. .... however I’d seriously suggest new joiners consider buying a bidding app once they are on-line ...the company interface would have the aforementioned Turing struggling to produce anything meaningful.

Based on the PRIAM results I would expect plenty of hiring on both the 787 and 777 this year. However, there might already be sufficient people in the hold pool to cover these needs. All longhaul fleets need pilots.

There’s nothing wrong with it at all - that’s not really what I meant. I am just surprised at the complexity of rostering. The information given on here is hugely helpful, and thank you to all those giving it.

Would anyone mind shedding some light on verbal reasoning and numerical reasoning done on stage 1?
And what level of maths to expect?

Would Greatly appreciate it

Flying high,

I think you'd probably be better off asking that question in the other forum, 'Interviews, Jobs and Sponsorship'.
Good luck.

Trust me, there are about 4000 people who continue to be surprised....:bored:

Feb rosters came out yesterday and on company yammer we have the now traditional questions being asked which are usually along the lines of “WTH didn’t my bid work this time around???????”

Our good friend “Global Contraints”.

All of my bid groups feasible but most failed due to GC. JSS is a total shambles that no one seems to really understand. Still can’t find anyone on the line willing to admit they actually voted for this s***!

L - - award all work. 1 bid group only, no avoids and I end up in fall back bid group 4.....???

Darned if I know..other than to get the work covered they needed you into fallback (?mode 3) to get more hours on your line....have you ended up way above CAP by any chance?

Bex, that means you went into fallback stage 3, which is to widen the credit range by an hour. I personally think the credit range is one of the biggest reasons why fallback effects so many people, why global constraints goes so high, and why junior guys are working their nuts off. The problem is we are trying to make JSS as much like old bidline as possible, and it just isn’t. We had a lot of control over our old banks and they appear to be restricting the credit ranges to try and mimic that. This means JSS is covering the work with one hand tied behind its back, leaving lots of uncovered work. Junior guys have very little if any control once global constraints gets involved. Every month under JSS, I get told here’s what you could have had, but we’ve just given it to someone else during global constraints, so here, have this crap instead. We know you specifically requested not to have that work, but never mind. It’s like the old roster assign, only they remove every single trip you had rather than just the one, and they don’t pay you if you work over CAP.

Can you tell me if there is a training bond for non type rated First Officers?

There is no bond.

bex no offence but ask your fo's, or one of the Jss trainers how to make a proper bid, L-- award all work and only one bid group doesn't sound you understand the system very well.

Almost 2 years in on the 777 and the rosters have been pretty good for a while, granted I am not pushing for weekends off but have been getting a pretty good balance of trips. Just takes a few goes to work out the best JSS bid for your seniority.

Thank you.

bex, do you use ibid? It’s “bid generator” works really well (other bidding apps are available!)

18 months in, on SH, i generally get the length of trips I want and broadly the nightstops I bid for. Weekends off are rare in summer, but I’ve had a few so far this winter. Mid haul / standovers are like golden hens teeth for me. My only real complaint is having to do reserve every 3rd month. Hopefully that will change with the shorter reserve periods supposedly coming soon.

wouldn’t be surprised if that ended sooner rather than later. People have been leaving inside their first couple of years in droves recently. It can’t have escaped BA’s attention, particularly in the current cost dominated climate.

Hardly leaving in Droves Rex (despite the best efforts of the company).

A quick look through the seniority lists shows about 30 “missing numbers” between seniority number 3400 - 4600 (estimate those with seniority 3400 joined about 5 years ago) works out at an attrition rate of 2.5% - surprisingly low considering.

That has just prompted me to take a look through the PRIAM results to see for myself and I agree, the number of people leaving is exceedingly low despite the rumours suggesting otherwise. I can count only 10 missing numbers before people are getting multiple valid bids (presumably about the 5 years in position).

Expect there'll be a good number off to Virgin when contracts start going out. I do fly with many who are 'looking' but with Brexit hanging over the industry at the moment it's a risky time to move. Last in, first out.

about 20 Dutch guys/girls left a couple of years ago as KLM were recruiting. Mainly from our P777 status. I do fly with lots of junior FO’s who are looking at other options. In particular virgin at Manchester for the NW commuters.

Yes you can bid for your leave and duty free weeks to abut your part time days, but this is subject to the normal leave bidding process and you having enough points to obtain the weeks you are wanting.

75% reserve takes place within your three weeks on (rather than a full timer’s 4 weeks), but you earn the same points as a full timer. There are 6 fixed days off within those 21 days (2 blocks of 3 days in long haul, and 3 blocks of 2 days in short haul).

Anyone know good websites for interview prep? Is it always the case you will hear from day 1 after a few days or can the interview/group ex be taken after the mathematical and verbal reasoning section?

There has been some opportunity to make a whole day of it and do a combined testing, interview and group ex all in one day. When you get invited to first stage and book online have a look if a combined stage 1 and 2 is available. Otherwise you will do them separately. Re interview - it's all competency based ie tell me a time when.... Make sure you know why you want to join and know your stuff else you'll be weeded out!

Any news about the pool?
 

Any news on starting dates/fleets soon. Last people out of the pool? Thanks. Best luck to all.