@HCHY4 the bottom has basically fallen out of the industry. Of the 7 different fleets in the airline I work for, one fleet was shut down permanently. Those pilots are either undergoing retraining onto another fleet, or waiting for their turn to retrain but remain grounded for the time being. 2 fleets are grounded for the foreseeable future, but with the hole they may come back one day. Those pilots are also grounded. The remaining 4 fleets are operating approximately 7% of the flights they were doing before Covid. I am on the busiest fleet; each month we ‘bid’ for work, with a typical pilot getting 4 or 5 long haul trips in a normal month, but now there are not enough trips remaining for every pilot to get even the bare minimum of work to keep within the minimum of ‘recency’ ie 3 take offs and landings every 90 days, so we are regularly going into the simulators to keep our recency up.
WRT pay, my company famously declared at the start of the pandemic that they did not need help from the government as we were in good financial shape, so it did not take furlough for it’s staff to start with. Shortly after that, it made redundancies and such is the nature of the career that we agreed to take a huge pay cut to protect our company and as many of the jobs as possible - we figured it was better to keep as many pilots on as possible even if it meant reduced wages all round. We took a 50% cut in our basic pay for 3 months, then another 6 months at 20% reduction, and we are currently at about 10% reduction. We are normally paid a proportion of our salary as basic pay and the remainder as variable pay based on our flying hours - with almost no flying there is almost no flying pay either. Hundreds were made redundant anyway, many of them still with massive training loans to pay, and there is a pool of unemployed pilots being kept afloat by those who do still have jobs, although pilots are resourceful and have set up a range of businesses and taken on a wide variety of jobs to tide them over.
The trips we are doing are strange ones. I have flown aircraft with no one on except the pilots, and it is rather weird and a bit scary at the back of a pitch black aircraft at night when you do the fire watch walk! We have carried a lot of freight - everything from PPE or medical supplies to fruit and veg. Much of the fresh fruit and veg in the uk in our winter is flown in. I’ve also done some repatriation flights earlier in the pandemic. We are still flying passengers to some destinations atm, but they are mainly travelling for either work reasons or for personal essential reasons, for example on one flight to the Caribbean recently we had fewer than 30 passengers and they included a team of marine engineers, a group of scientists travelling to conclude a research project, and a family going to a funeral. No holidaymakers even on what would normally be deemed a holiday flight, and instead of 6 trips per week to that island which would all normally be full, there was only 1 flight. The public get cross if we carry out flights with passengers, but also get cross if we cut off a route altogether too.
I’ve had a couple of trips to destinations that have handled Covid well, where after at least one and sometimes 2 negative Covid tests within a 24hr period we are free to move around the destination, and those have been a lovely, very welcome escape. Most of the places I am going atm though, fall into one of 3 categories - confined to hotel grounds, strict room confinement, or a there-and-back. The there and backs are exhausting, and need 5-8 pilots on them. They are to places where pilots are not allowed to get off the aircraft and have to come straight back such as China or South Africa. It messes with every bit of you physically to be at work for about 30 hours in such an uncomfortable work environment, and the CAA is monitoring it closely. The hotel confinement is OK, depending on the hotel. I spent 5 days in the Middle East in a hotel we could not even go outside from, and had only the option of staying in our 12ft square room with the view of the back of a hangar from our window or sitting in the ‘vip lounge’ which was a table and chairs in the lobby surrounded by a Perspex screen. The strict room confinement is just about tolerable for 24hrs but beyond that messes with your head. Some pilots have tested positive downroute and been taken away to hospitals - there have been some very scary stories, one in particular where a pilot was kept prisoner in China for being 0.1C over the acceptable temperature and it was a fight to get them released even though they had 9 very invasive Covid tests which all came back negative. I am not sure the company or the British government would have much luck getting someone back if certain foreign authorities decided they needed to make an example of someone!
It’s a far cry from the job I signed up for, but I am grateful to still have a job. All of us though are looking forward to a time we can travel again, even though I suspect Covid means aviation will never really return to what it was.