A friend just showed me their new updated payscales with their pay rise….. amazing!

Thanks all for the helpful and insightful responses.
Is the freeze at EF still 6 years? The onboarding packages simply state “after a short freeze” with no defined time. I’ve heard others have managed to make the move to Heathrow already which in that case would make it less than 2 years since Euroflyer began

BAEF is terrible T&C wise, doing 5-6 years there while being good for the MSL position is going to be bad for your financial and mental health, especially if you need to pay SE UK rental/house prices for being down there...

Virgin wouldn't be a terrible place to be in comparison, and it has much faster times to command than BA for LH now (7-10 compared to 18+) that could be a huge advantage if you want to stay there long term. BA in comparison has terrible salaries for those who want fast commands. LHR SH takes Paypoint 11 to match a Year 1 WUK/EZY/J2 Captain. Paypoint 24/25 to match a Year 10/11 WUK/EZY Captain.

My order for you would be: BA LHR base, Virgin, BAEF/Norse at the bottom. (WUK currently pay better than BAEF, which is a bit embarassing)

WUK do not pay better than EF for their FOs, unless they’ve snuck a 30K payrise in without anyone realising. Particularly when you include the 2024 pay rise for EF, which brings them a lot closer to Heathrow, albeit not quite all the way.

Assuming you never need a day off sick, have no intention of doing anything other than 850+ hours a year on an airbus, and don’t want a pension, Wizz UK might make a bit of sense for a quick command. But when you add it all together with an early command there’s not that much in it for the first few years. WUK then goes ahead for captains by Y12, where you’d sit forever. BA lags but only gets better and clearly surpasses it eventually.

As a data point, a day 1 BAEF FO already gets over 7x more paid into their pension by their employer than a training captain at Wizz UK does. That to me is a pretty massive red flag.

I’d reorder it BA LHR, BA EF, Virgin, Norse. Plenty of people evidently doing 18-24 months at Euroflyer and skipping up the road anyway

This is a pretty crazy statistic… and I agree of it being a red flag!

You won’t need a pension if you do 850+ hours a year for your whole career, you won’t live to see it! :oh:

The people doing 1-2 years at LGW were mostly guys forced from mainline coming back. It seems to be quite rare now for EF people to come to LHR considering how short staffed they are.

its about 3-4x more into their pension than Wizz (FO-TCP all receive the same (although they might have fixed this now so it’s uncapped) unless they sal sacrifice to get the higher match (which should be done)

BAEF is the same as Wizz, they want you doing as close to 900 as possible, so work life balance is just as bad, if not worse as you can get a fixed roster with Wizz at least.

For reference, it will take you 22 years as a SH captain at BA Mainline to match PP11 at Wizz (with current pay deals as reference). BAEF will will match Wizz captains first year after being there for 12 years. Regarding FO, you will be on 85-90k at Wizz within 2-3 years depending on how much you fly. That takes 7 years at EF. (This is including their pay rises)

this is in no way me recommending Wizz, my only recommendation is to leave them asap, however it does show how bad the conditions at EF are, even after their new pay deal.

The only benefit EF has is your MSL number, which is a useful thing, but is it worth an unknown amount of years being stuck on some of the worst conditions in the UK (especially if you are 30+ where you won’t be reaching top pay points until the very end of your career)

Have a look again at the pension. Wizz pay in a max of £110/month through auto-enrolment. That’s regardless of who you are and what you do. BAEF does indeed pay over 7x for a day 1 FO than Wizz do for your year 12 Captain. The PP21 shorthaul captain you speak of by all accounts is getting about 20x that into their pension each year from the company. That is a truly staggering difference.

To ignore that, that’s before allowances etc, is extremely shortsighted.

This all assumes of course the publicly available and anecdotal information about Wizz and BA’s pensions are accurate. Though given BA’s payscales are public (ish) and I’ve never seen anything to the contrary about Wizz, I think it’s fairly accurate.

Let me reclarify.

im looking at the BAEF MOA + Payrise info. I’m looking at our mainline pay calculator for the new pay rise. I’m looking at the Wizzair pay info.

BAEF and WUK I haven’t included the pensions because I’m not sure if the WUK has improved it. But excluding the pension, you make significantly more money, much faster there than you do at euroflyer. Mainline is different, and is still one of the best places to be in the UK (low seniority command isn’t great which is why they have trouble filling it due to terrible lifestyle losses at the bottom of seniority). Yes the pension is far superior, but in EF case the salary still sucks for the similar workload you have compared to Wizzair doing 850+ hours a year.

again, I’m not recommending Wizz as it’s a terrible place to work unless it’s your first job and you need to get some experience before you can move to BA, J2, EZY, virgin etc. I’m just saying that EF specifically has a poor deal compared to its competitors in the UK market, and therefor shouldn’t be an automatic second place to Mainline BA.

Not just PRP have been released early, there’s pilots less than 12 months in with an okay bid expecting a transfer this training year.

The pension is a relevant consideration - it’s going to have to come out of your pay eventually anyway. With that included year 1 FO at EF is in the region of 80k, so not sure it’s accurate that you’d be better off at Wizz. What’s the basic pay there nowadays by the way?

If you want the options you can get from a career at BA, provided you’re able to live within a drivable distance of Gatwick and are happy doing day trips by all accounts it’s not a bad place to be.