And, if you have looked at how your pension savings have done, you might need to work a whole lot longer as well. And if you reach the 'age ban' that 'work a whole lot longer' might even be 'stacking shelves', with whatever Ts&Cs that involves...

Please Noel, you build your pension over 40 plus years. To look at pension results during a huge crisis does not make any sense..

You should definately stand up and defend your T&C's. However in this crisis you should offer something like mandatory 50 percent part time or temporary offers eg pay freezes etc.

The eternal question of whether it's better to screw few by a lot or many by somewhat less... That's a time when everyone will find out what their union is worth. What Lufthansa proposed (45% cut for everyone but no jobs lost) is likely to remain an isolated case because union leaders at many other places will likely defend the hefty paychecks of themselves and their buddies and push those below them under the bus rather than agree to take a cut themselves but keep everyone in employment.

Tommy, I agree that pension savings are long term. If you have a 40 year career ahead of you that makes sense. In the present circumstances if you have a decade or so to go, not only have your savings taken a huge dent with all economic forecasts not looking promising for a long time for improvements. Added to that, any serious dent to employments prospects will have dented not only earnings, but with that the ability to keep up those pension contributions. Then, just to make it all worse, if you are in Northern Europe you will have an age ban putting you out of work at least a couple of years before you can get your State Pension or equivalent. And if your income prospects have taken a dent, like being thrown out of employment (or pushed under the bus) in the way that PilotLZ has so well explained, that Sate Pension (which is not to be sneezed at) could be so important to your livelihood and a couple of years or more wait for it could be really unpleasant. Yes, it is a long term bit of your planning, but when things go wrong too close to the end, in addition to possible unemployment that long term concept goes out of the window.

Right now, staying in jobs is far more important than 'Ts&Cs'.

Noel I hope that your private pension fund is low risk with only a decade to go. Yes you might lose a bit but a lot less actually than the youngsters with 40 years to go. That should be OK if you are able to keep a job. But I disagree with you that staying in a job is more important than T&C's. Especially since the younger generation will have lower and lower and lower terms for a longer term which makes it even more anti social imo. Redundancy sucks big time but much lower terms over an extended time sucks even harder. Believe me I have been screwed before and most likely will be screwed again.

Because executive daddy and mommy want little tommy to go to oxford flight school

I could be mistaken, but wasn't that an offer from the pilots instead of the company? And that 45% included a whole lot of extra pay, like the profit share, so the actual reduction would be around 20% of basic, normal monthly salary.
It does depend. If you want to fly in my homecountry, you will not get anywhere with a "self made" license.
The 2 biggest airlines require a certain path which does cost the mentioned amount.

​​​​​​​Of course you can still go "cheap" and hope for a job abroad, but most would like to stay in the country if possible.

Anyone who thinks that terms and conditions are going to improve down the road are extremely niave.

Even in the good times that have passed people are willing to pay for overpriced courses (Easyjet / BA / Virgin) be employed by agencies on low pay zero hour contract to get their hands on a shiny jet (Norwegian / Ryanair).

The airlines see this and they are going to abuse it in the future because there is a never ending line of mugs willing to set the bar even lower just so they can get their hands on a shiny jet.

And where does all this lead to from a training perspective? He who pays wins? Where is the oversight from the safety/SMS boys and girls to ensure the 'right stuff' is being assessed rather than the size of a person's wallet? Have the risks of wallet based hiring been assessed? Are airlines looking for cash cows or employees? How many instances do we need of people who don't know where they are in an aircraft nor a notion as to what is going on all through type rating, making the instructor work extra and causing their partner's development to suffer?

Lots of these questions are rhetorical I admit but must we start speaking up that we aren't happy if it all changes drastically? Is that incredibly naive? Will it take an accident for someone to realise something has gone wrong?

Do we need EASA/CAA law to be that all parts of recruitment (assessment and type rating bar living costs) are expressly not allowed to be funded by the candidate so as to maintain the integrity of recruitment? It would be an easily justifiable regulation from a safety perspective.

I was very lucky to have been hired by one of the few airlines who i never had to pay a penny towards, from assessment to type rating. I had this discussion with one of the decision making pilots in the company and he said the company's view is that it is their responsibility to fund it all. I should hope it stays that way in the post COVID world (along with me staying in employment! :})

Not only do people sitting on the sideline still have to pay bills and in some cases accepting different T&C's to stay afloat but also what about the cargo? There is no doubt going to be a turn down in the general public that fly. This will be due to having lost employment and living on credit as most people do (showing my age but when I was a wee bit younger if you did not have money in the pocket you did not buy that hamburger, wine, steak etc as there was no credit/card) with that being maxed out and having to be re-payed. The best case for the public is a delay in holidays due to having to either use leave whilst closed down or leave without pay which means no money for a holiday. Not having bums in seats may drag the recovery out even longer.

Yes and Yes.
(My bold)

An accident is unlikely to change anything because linking it to a systemic issue will be nigh on impossible.

The regulator has no interest whatsoever in recruitment practices or indeed Ts&Cs. To put it bluntly, as long as the regulatory minimum standards are achieved, the regulator is not interested in anything else.

I fully agree with guy. Regulation and Ts&Cs are two totally different matters.


Tommy, you are making even a stronger case than I have that pilots are going to have to work longer, especially the younger pilots.


Anyone looking at that graph above who thinks that terms and conditions are going to stay the same is extremely naive.


But I will repeat, keeping pilots employed through this will be more important than clinging onto those 'naive' Ts&Cs.

Thanks Noel. I see your opinion but I have to disagree with your last sentence. Once something is given it will not come back easily. Hence stick to your contractual T&C's. HOWEVER: For the duration of this crisis I think it is completely acceptable to save money where you can with alternative solutions. Mandatory part time is one of them. You work 50 percent, you get 50 percent (percentages could vary of course)
​​​Instant savings for the company. And you keep the workforce current for when the better times arrive. This is imo where the unions should push for.

You also have to realise that, at least in most countries, redundancies are expensive. You have to pay them severance pay that you can't miss. If LIFO is applied you make your cost per flight hour even higher.
​​​​​​

Wonder when the first incident will be attributed to a crew member fiddling around with face mask at critical point. Its all about risk and mitigation

What are you talking about? My employer is advising against wearing masks in a flight deck, according to EASA's recommendations. Straight from my DFO's mouth.

Tommy, I think we are pretty much in agreement in 'concepts', it's just where we see the terminology differently. From what many have been saying here, any reduction to part time, compulsory or other, with the resultant reduction in pay would be seen as a change in Ts&Cs. But I agree with you that it makes an enormous amount of sense to keep as many as possible in jobs. Unless there are contractual agreements for redundancy in the UK "... the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £16,140", so not that expensive. Pilots should get together to avoid other pilots being 'thrown under that bus', as more and more pilots out of jobs will drag down any future Ts&Cs fast.

GKOC41, face masks are not worn on the flight deck. Joe is correct on that one. They are only worn as you are leaving so I don't think that closing the door can count as a 'critical point'!

Those claiming a mask cause an incident have not flown a bang seat . Not only a helmet and mask but strapped in tight , very little movement.

Methinks they mean different masks...

Haven't got a clue what a bang seat is, but would those masks perhaps included oxygen, microphone and certification as well as rigorous training?

I believe a bang seat is a seat that emits a "bang" if you pull a specific handle or it could also be a seat that helps you "bang" by telling your war stories to ladies (or gents depending on taste).

The cockpit seats on some Fokker 50s made a sort of bang sound when the adjustment lever was used. Can't 'member a mask attached.


Maybe more of a crunch or creak though, it has been a while ago...

bang, as in “bang out”...to eject.

You can't cheat economics, as said before it's simple supply and demand.

Whether you decide to save everyone's job or whether you decide to job share terms and conditions will come down.

Now for a few, these terms and conditions in the future will eventually come back to some a degree or another.

But for the masses I don't believe as a pilot you will see great terms for a very long time.

There will be a mass load of pilots on the market, and very few jobs to go around. Furthermore this virus won't just disappear, no drugs are significantly working and vaccine is months / years off, which means with reduced travel, holidays abroad there is probably still a good chance of other airlines still going bust, leaving even more pilots unemployed.

Now born out of every crisis there is likey to be new startup companies to suck up pilots / crew etc. But these startup companies are more likely to follow a Ryanair type of employment, whereby you will be on a zero hour contract, and have to pay for training. And there will be an abundance of pilots signing up to these daft contracts a, ready to shaft one another to see how low they can go. Let's face it, they were doing it in the good times, so they are certainly going to do it in the bad times!

Also soon as there is a glimmer of hope on the horozion of improvement in the job market, your likely to see mentored pilot schemes starting to pop up. Why because it is a fantastic revenue source for training organisations and the airlines. When this improvement happens will these newbie pilots be required, I would say not due to the surplus of pilots on the market, but these schemes will still go ahead, wherby a pilot who is unemployed, will loose a potential job to a newbie, who is strictly probably not required at that time.

If future pilots can not get an employment contract or their training paid what hope have you got for proper terms and conditions in the future.

In order to change things the supply needs to be changed. As I said before one way to change the supply is change hrs required to fly a jet, hrs to become captain, increase age to fly passengers etc. The other thing that's needs to be done is stop these zero hour contracts. If these were stopped there would more of a level playing field wherby other pilots can not undercut other pilots by signing up to dodgy companies.

That said for these things to change, there has to be a change in the law / regulations and I doubt very much that will happen hence why there will not be an improvement in working conditions.

From what I've read, it is 50/50 at best whether an effective vaccine will ever be found. The Chief Medical Officer said in one of the daily briefings that a vaccine may never be found. Unless governments start aggressively promoting the reality of the situation, that this is a virus which overwhelmingly leads to mild or no symptoms whatsoever, then aviation is finished, along with society as we know it.

And the 300k plus deaths due to covid are in fact attributed to chemtrails ?

Even if every single one of those 300k deaths is a direct result of Covid-19 (which isn't the case), it accounts for 0.004% of the world's population. Malaria kills 400k+ people a year. HIV does for around one million. Flu accounts for (according to the WHO, if you can believe anything they say), 250k to 650k depending on the severity of the strain.

The point is that the severity of Covid-19 simply doesn't justify the hysterical reaction.

I can't really remember much of a 'bang' from the Fokker 50's seat, but you could get one from the J41's seat if you pulled the handle to adjust the height without holding your weight with you feet ant legs: the 'bang' was when your seat hit the floor! It was a great one to use on unsuspecting FO's in the middle of their PA -- reach across and pull his/her seat's height adjusting handle and they would drop to the floor with a startled 'bang'! One of the older and wiser FOs that I flew with would always position the metal-clad tech log next to his seat so that if I tried that I would probably have my fingers chopped off!! (Sadly he won't be able to read this but John was great to fly with!)

Another similar story about a 'bang' to the floor, in an aeroplane with masks and all. Someone that I knew (let's call him Ian) who once flew Vampires (the ones with no ejection seats, just the old 'sit on' parachute). He was leading a pair on a 'run and break' on their return to the airfield. He pulled really hard on the 'break'. The pins holding his seat-height in place sheared, with his seat dropping down its runners to the floor with a 'bang' and the extra jolt causing him temporarily to black out. he came to going skywards sitting on the floor, so he levelled off on instruments. His wing-man was startled at his 'trajectory' and called to ATC that he was going to catch up and find out what was going on. As his wing-man caught up Ian head his memorable call to ATC "There's no-one inside!"!! Ian then grabbed the bottom on the canopy to pull himself up and peer over the edge to see his wing-man, to be told later that is was a most memorable "Kilroy was here" fingers with a helmeted and masked face that appeared looking 'over the wall' out of the aeroplane!! (The recovery landing was apparently done with the wing-man 'talking him down' to short final where he 'stood' up and did a rudderless landing...)

Apologies for going off topic, but these stories need to be told...

DrJones, I don't think that many of your 'solutions' are likely ever to happen, but I do agree with you forecast of outcomes. Your first sentence says it all. Hence the need for pilots to work together to ensure that as many of them stay in employment as long as possible (in more ways that one), regardless of what income might be for the next while, to ensure that as many as possible are still able to benefit from any pick-up once this problem is over.

(I also think that your 'market forces' will do away with a lot of the expensive 'get a licence quick' and pay for type-ratings concepts: who would want to plan to go into this industry with any huge debt when it has now been clearly shown that everything could go over a cliff-edge in a matter of weeks.)

guy, I'm not quite so doom-and-gloom about the need for a vaccine. The Deputy Chief Medical Officer recently pointed out that the world is living with, and managing, many deadly diseases (she quoted that only smallpox has been eradicated, all the others are still out there). Not everything has come to a grinding halt because of them. Some genuine management of this one at source could have avoided us all needing such dramatic management of it now. But we will get there, vaccine or not.

I agree with you! I don't think a vaccine is the holy grail. I think that if the government message had been sensible from the beginning and they'd made it absolutely clear that this was basically a mild infection for the vast majority rather than scaring the hell out of the population with the hectoring "Stay home, protect the NHS, Save Lives" nonsense, we wouldn't be in this mess and we would just be getting on with it.

309k people have died of Covid from the 22nd of January to date (so less than 4 months) and half of these 4 months have been spent on quarantine by most of the countries world wide. I am not a doctor and/or an epidemiologist but I guess that if nothing had been done we would be talking of numbers 3,4,5 or maybe 10 times higher than these. The majority of these 300k deaths were either elderly people or people with other diseases BUT they were living a normal life with all the treatments that modern medicine and science can provide, allowing them to have a longer life expectancy till they hit the Cov2. I would be happier than you are if we could all be proven of overreacting to this disease, but only time will tell and in the mean time we have to play it safe.

Plenty of literature is now emerging from those actual medical experts saying that the lockdowns have been largely unnecessary and have achieved very little (aside from trashing people’s livelihoods of course). Of course from here unfortunately it’s a face saving exercise and we know how important that is to politicians especially.

Typically they say lethality is not what the worst case predicted (hint: there is a reason it's called the worst case scenario) and the health system managed to cope. So far I understood the reason behind the restrictions was to slow down the spread so that the health system would cope and lethality could be controlled.

Besides, those people be they right or wrong are given a channel to voice their opinion via media. That media who every single day need a story more shocking than yesterday's to make ends meet.

My best take is the very same information scavengers and their pimping editors who were chasing ambulances 2 month ago, singing praises for nurses and doctors 4weeks ago, who are putting braveheart alternate opinions into the spotlight right now.

Are the facts being reported true? Probably yes. Is the overall picture one of selective reporting, showing a malinformed reflection on reality? Most definitely so.

I find this argument hard to believe and most alleged proof of this that I’ve seen seems very thin. Without a lockdown hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed.

National ICU bed usage didnt exceed 60% in the UK. We were a long way off, plus, ICU capacity was significantly increased, probably one of the success stories from all of this. There were individual hospitals close to breaking, but thats why the military were ready on standby to fly cases to where capacity was available from the capital.

I feel like lockdown has really acted as a giant slap in the face to everyone (well, the VAST majority that are following it or trying thier best), basically that all of this really does matter and you should be concerned with hygiene, don't visit your gran, limit opportunity for the virus to spread. Obviously this effect will wain so after an easing, a step up of measures might have to happen to remind people of what's at stake. I've been clinical with it all over the last THREE months as I realise that if I dont do my best, I won't feel like I did everything I could if the worst comes and my job security comes into explicit question. I'm sure that principle (fear) guides a lot of us in other industries too.

I am now happy for restrictions to be eased as I think that in general, people have learned the lesson. I don't think that the government did things vaguely well initially but for me, Stay Alert is a sensible message at this point of time. Schools should certainly be going back with sensible measures and gentle steps. It does annoy me though, I am 32 and have a lot of teacher friends of the same age on facebook etc, so many of them seem publically outraged that they're being sent back into the breach when frankly I cant think of one who could really consider themselves as vunerable. I know they're working their asses off running classes from home, but that's only part of what education does and many parents bluntly don't give a crap.

This is what I said when this all started.

Keep calm, take daily multi-vitamins and minerals, (so your immune system has all the resources it needs to be as strong as it can be), and be considerate and sensible. Those at risk should self isolate. My 80+ Uncle and Aunt both had Covid19 and both have recovered without staying in hospital.

However, a former colleague who had cancer, had her chemotherapy stopped because the hospital she attended concentrated on Covid19. She recently died.

Being frustrated with the circumstances is understandable. But be careful about simplifying too much and using statistic in one context only. I was sceptical about this at the outset. But this 'thing' has now 'murdered' three times the number of people in the UK in the space of two moths than the estimates for the worst flu season had done in the past two or so decades. (And then there are the additional sad cases, such as mentioned by uplinker.) The Deputy Chief Medical Officer (a specialist in influenza infection) stated recently that the sum total of human knowledge of this virus in humans has been over five months. Two months ago, when dramatic decisions were being made, that sum total was three months. So for myself, my scepticism has reduced massively. This is bad. We are not the only country that has suffered. In others the lockdown has been more harsh (I have seen it) and no doubt the economic recovery is going to be more difficult elsewhere. We are where we are and I do not want to be an armchair specialist saying 'we should have...', this entire situation has been unique. We need to get on with what we can. With hopefully as many pilots in employment as possible.

However, my purchase choices from now on always start with the country of manufacture being the primary 'filter'.

Covid 19 is now the second deadliest infectious disease in the world by the number of daily deaths, just short of tuberculosis, and before malaria and HIV. "Just a flu"...