The Topsy Turvy World of a Modern Pilot

Posted on: 03.06.2012    17:31:36

The world is a smaller world, not physically but helped by modern communications ranging from cheap flight airlines to the smart phone and the internet.

The aviation industry is in turmoil. pilots striking in India, Airlines going bust or being closed down in Europe and now we have pilots striking or quilting in order to try and protect existing benefits.

More than 100 pilots of Lufthansa’s subsidiary Austrian Airlines have quit recently to avoid having to work for lower salaries under new contracts introduced by the German carrier to cut costs.

Lufthansa, Europe’s biggest airline, also faces trouble in its operations in Germany, where wage talks with flight crews were interrupted, raising the possibility of a strike.

The carrier is not only losing a fifth of its pilots, but some 200 of its 1,500 flight attendants also want to leave.

The Lufthansa spokesman said that no flights would have to be cancelled, as the company had been employing too many pilots and was planning to sell 11 airplanes to save costs.

At Austrian Airlines’ parent Lufthansa, crew representatives demanded that managers reveal their plans for staffing airplanes, otherwise they would strike in mid-June.

Lufthansa has announced that it wants to boost its operative profit by at least 1.5 billion euros (1.9 billion dollars) until 2014, with a third of that amount coming from lowered personnel costs.

To that end, the company has started hiring 240 contract workers as flight attendants.

The Lufthansa group made a loss of 397 million euros in the first quarter as it desperately unloaded BMIBaby to try to stem loses.

However, elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia and Australia there is a skills shortage of pilots but if any profession is able to relocate then it is Pilots. Australia has skills shortages in virtually every profession by the shortage of pilots with a minimum of 1500 hour total flying time is now so acute that one or two airlines are looking at Fly in Fly out arrangements to try and beat the delays caused by the slow bureaucracy of issuing employer sponsored 457 visas.

 

Author: Chris Slay

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