Airline crew - what are you doing at the moment?

[squashyhat]

Genuine question. I live near Gatwick, and plane movements have gone down from one every 5-10 minutes (depending on wind direction) to one or two a day. I have just looked at Flightradar and there is one plane leaving for Belfast and that's it. I know planes are still flying cargo and some passengers but there must be thousands of flight and cabin crew who aren't needed. Are you on furlough? How are you keeping your hours up?

@Mocktail So pilots aren’t in a worse position, quite the opposite (at the airline I worked for). 😮😮

I am going to assume you just didn’t read the bits of my post about:

• no furlough for months
• 50% pay cuts to basic salary
• no flying pay
• hundreds of redundancies
• £100k+ training loan repayments for junior pilots
• pilot community funded support for redundant pilots

That’s before I mention:

• stress caused by lack of fleet or recency
• extreme roster instability (ie you don’t know which days you might be working on, for months on end, but are expected to be available at any time)
• 30 hour work shifts
• solitary room confinement
• aggressive Covid testing in many destinations

It’s not a competition to see who has got it worst, but I think to suggest that there are pilots who are better off during the pandemic due to the state of the industry is extremely naive at best, wilfully ignorant at worst.

stress caused by lack of fleet....

I suspect some won't realise (though I'd hope those in the industry would) that a commercial pilot's licence is generally only valid at any one time on a single type (though there's some overlap allowed in certain circumstances between similar types e.g; 777/787 and some of the smaller Airbus types).

What this can mean in current circumstances is that if your type, a.k.a. fleet has been sent to the scrap yard (e.g. the 747) or totally grounded though hopefully only temporarily (Airbus A380) then you are now sat at home wondering if you'll have a job at the end of all this, or what you'll need to do to re-qualify, even if the airline as an entity comes out of it OK.

Thanks for your helpful reply back in the box
I really did try to help the industry travelling to Tenerife 3 times a year from Newcastle

We managed to just squeeze March and October in but had to fly from Manchester when Tui wouldn’t fly to countries you had to quarantine from

We tried to get back again in December ( my test results got lost) and last month when we got dropped again

I loved flying with Easyjet jet 2 or tui
And I thought pre covid things must be bad when we lost Thomas cook completely and then Easyjet from Newcastle

Used to love it when we came into land at Tenerife airport on a Tuesday or Friday and all the tui planes would be in

I’m hoping for October but feeling less hopeful

Customers are out there and we hope we get our chance to show our loyalty
I keep thinking of our Tenerife friends who missed us in December and March.
Feels like a lifetime ago

We were evacuated from Tenerife in March 2020
Itwasgrim bit the ( jet2) cabin crew were amazing

Like you say it’s all the industries around the airport
Manchester airport in October was like a ghost town

My town has a significant engineering sector related to aviation. Restructuring was going to happen anyway, but this was expediated which affects peoples' planning for retirement and mass redundancy meaning more people chasing transferable roles.

Without connection to the industry myself I know one who's taken an earlier than planned retirement, one lost apprenticeship now gone to a different career in the publiv sector and a voluntary redundancy who's side-stepped and found an indirectly related role. Across town though, it will have a significant effect on the wider local economy from losing quality jobs and disposable income.