Let's All Bend Over

I couldn't really think of a good title for this, but hopefully it's appropriate. What I really want to talk about and question, is why this industry has gotten to the stage that it is at now? Specifically, how are airlines charging for assessments? Why are we paying for type ratings? Why are some of us on bogus self-employed contracts? And most importantly, why are we OK with it? These are questions that we’ve all asked at one point, yet we consider them to be just the norm in this day and age. One thing is for certain; our terms and conditions have eroded and will continue sliding that way with this Coronavirus bollocks.

A lot of the statements in this post are purely from the things that I have personally seen and experienced. I’m not going to mention who I work for or any company names in question because quite frankly, I like my job thanks, and I don’t fancy getting sued.

We first have to look at how the industry once was. Air travel started as thing for the upper class. I mean, can you believe that they once had fine china and cutlery on-board for meals as standard throughout the cabin? It was the same case for flight crew; leisurely layovers, very relaxed rosters, lots of pussy, and most importantly, incredible remuneration packages.

Speaking just for the UK, all major airlines gave out unlimited food, transport, huge pension contributions, medical insurance, loss of license, insurance for your genitals, you name it. But something happened along the way. Previously, holiday makers only really considered exotic locations far away. Then some clever American cunt, established the first ever low cost airline in the 1970s, and is now one of the biggest in the world. Then in the 1990s, a couple of cunts in Europe wanted in on the action, and now we see loads of Blue and Yellow and Orange planes everywhere. People laughed at the idea, ‘what the fuck is that? A fucking orange plane with a phone number painted down the side? They won’t last’. But they did, and now budget airlines are the most profitable way to make money in this business. These clever bastards started to think in terms of balance sheets, rather than shit that customers found enjoyable and satisfying. And thus, the face of aviation changed forever. Ticket prices fell. I mean I remember seeing adverts for £9.99 flights from Stansted to Dublin? I thought that might just fucking go for the sake of it. How was it possible?

Of course, there is a price for everything. You didn’t think that the CEOs of these budget carriers were offering cheap tickets to really make flying more accessible to people were they? No, their primary goal was to make the airline business more profitable.

In the golden age of flying, airlines only made annual profit margins of around 1-2% which doesn’t really allow much room for error, especially given how volatile fuel prices are. You will have noticed, unless you’ve been under a fucking big rock for the last few months, that the travel industry is directly affected by the global economy. With such vulnerability, it’s pretty fucking important that if you’re going to be in the airline business, you need a shit load of cash and liquidity to not only survive shit like this, but also to fuck over your competitors.

How exactly do you increase profits then, whilst simultaneously decreasing the cost of the product?

It’s strange to imagine a time when everything was included in the air fare - baggage, free seat selections, free food. I mean for fuck sake, even the long haul carriers are charging for bags now. Who the fuck is going to fly to San Francisco without luggage? Airlines now make a fucking fortune out of all these charges. No one, unless you fucking hate your kids, is going to not pay €6 to sit with their family. Fucking piss take, but that is the case now. When it first became a thing to charge for not checking in and printing your boarding pass at home, people were fucking outraged. It was all over the news. How could a business charge for something that should be free? Well they did, it’s all legal. We are all relying on budget carriers more and more each year.

But once you’ve monetized everything on the passenger side of things, what else can you do to increase your profit margins? Well, you could scrimp on maintenance and training, but I doubt people will have the confidence to fly with you if you’re missing runways or falling out of the sky. It’s also pretty fucking expensive to buy a new plane. The other thing that seems pretty obvious then is to reduce the cost of the staff.

As an example, at one particular airline, the annual salary of an FO was £80000, this then dropped to £20000. You read that right, £20000 per year. Also nowadays, more airlines are weighing the pay towards productivity. Meaning, the more you fly, the more you get paid. This wasn’t the case in the old days, as almost all of the pay that pilots were getting was weighted towards salary. It’s easy to see why then, from an accountant’s point of view, paying pilots to be on the ground is fucking stupid.

Then there are the self-employed. Yes, can you actually believe that it’s possible for people in our profession, a group of educated, well trained individuals who are trusted by the lives of millions every day, are self-employed? The idea of it only came to light for me when I started Flight School. Before then I just looked at the figures that were advertised. ‘Average starting salary of a co-pilot on a £36000 on a jet’. I thought, brilliant, PAYE, pension, all that shit. Then some cunt from a very large LCC came in to give us a talk about how great his job was, and he started talking some shit about running a limited company, claiming expenses and paying little tax. Sounded pretty lucrative at the time, but a bit of me thought, well OK, it makes sense, you’re still taking home good money, providing you do 850 hours a year, and that’s like part time work anyway.

So then fast forward to my first interview after receiving my Frozen ATPL; where me and the majority of my classmates once again, end up having to pay for the fucking assessment. I mean I get that we have to cover the cost of travel and hotels, but the fucking assessment? We didn’t even get food. And no, it’s not just the airlines that are up to it, my own fucking flight school charged to assess people for the airlines that they were connected with. And a lot of those airlines have since gone under!

Doesn’t end there though – self funded training, food during training, accommodation, all the way through until you get to line training. So that’s like 3-5 months after already paying £100000, to having to pay all that shit on top, because apparently once you’re in aviation, you are assumed to have an unlimited pool of money ready to just dish out.

You’ll be glad to hear though, that it doesn’t stay like this, and eventually you do recuperate your costs, although it does take a fucking long time and many years of being a tight cunt to finally break even again. But what other profession do you know where the trainees are expected to sell their arses? If you were to train to be a Doctor in the UK, it would take around 5-6 years, so worst case with University fees, £55500 plus living costs. If you’re poor, you’d get additional support and even a grant if you’re a clever cunt. Some people are going to debate what job is more important, but there is no winner, they’re both very important in their own respects - Doctors are required to keep people alive. Pilots are required to fly dildo shaped tubes that transport millions of people around the world every second of the day, not just for leisure, but for business, and even for medical purposes.

How did we as a group of professionals, allow some of these practices to be acceptable? Can you imagine a normal rational human looking at some of these ridiculous sums of money and thinking that it is completely normal to pay it?  Almost everyone who I’ve told about these costs reacts with jaws dropped, and I’m just fucking lucky to have earned and re-saved to a comfortable level again.

There are no other group of professionals, who would stump up this money, or even put up with the kind of bullshit terms and conditions that are on offer. Last year there was this Ricardo Study, which looked into flight crew working conditions in Europe. Some of the shit they uncovered:

• 1 out of 5 are atypically employed – In other words, via an agency and not directly with the employer.
• 9% of pilots are self-employed – Figures vary among countries, type of carrier and business model.
• There is one particular airline, where 60% of their pilots are self-employed. The next airline was 3.6%.
• 6% of all pilots have been involved in pay-to-fly schemes – Probably the biggest disease to infect this industry.

Probably the scariest and most close to home fact for a lot of you reading, is that 93% of self-employment is fake – Meaning that the contract itself contracts the very principle of being self. It’s fucking ridiculous if you think about it. People choose to be self-employed, so that they can be flexible with their working hours, and decide where and when they want to work. In the case of being a self-employed pilot, it actually goes the opposite way, where you have zero flexibility on your annual leave and working hours, along with all of the negatives that come with self-employment, such as no sick pay, holiday pay, pension etc.

The other problem that these type of contracts presents, is that it will tend to make you think twice about calling in sick, when you might not actually be feeling up to it. I reckon 90% of us who are or were self-employed, are guilty of this. What we should be thinking is ‘I’m not up to it; there are almost 200 lives in my hands’. Instead, what a large number of us are thinking instead is ‘shit, I’m going to lose €400-€600 if pay if I don’t turn up today, I should just man-up’. This is what I believe, makes self-employed contracts in this profession disgusting. But for the sake of being fair to people who would or do like it, being a self-employed pilot is great if you are never sick.

It has to be said though, that these contracts tend to be more prevalent in Eastern Europe. Up until recently, the numbers of self-employed contracts in the UK and in Western Europe are reducing, thankfully due to union pressure and some government intervention.

The end result of all of this though, was huge a dick slap to the face for all of the legacy carriers. How can you, as a legacy carrier also lower your price to that of a budget airline? The only way is to start reducing your own costs. With the explosion of short-haul travel in Europe, timed nicely with the Great Recession in 2009, passengers will now just go for whatever comes up cheapest on Skyscanner.

How did we let it get this way? I really don’t think it’s as simple as blaming the airlines or the flight schools for monetising the whole industry in this way. If you were to step into the shareholders pants or knickers, you’d really have to give some of these CEOs a pat on the back for coming up with these kinds of ideas. Not only have you made travel cheaper, but you have increased profits ten-fold.

Another great thing too, is that this kind of expansion has led to the creation of thousands of jobs all over Europe, which I am very thankful for. And this simply would not have been possible if budget airlines never came about.

The thing that shits me up the most, is that there the limit to where things will be cut is becoming more blurry. 2020 will not only see thousands of job losses, but also, a nose-dive in our terms and conditions. I’ll say here that I would happily take a pay cut to save my job. But the problems I’ve raised with employment contracts in Europe could become a problem for us in the years to come. While the unions are busy trying stop management’s dicks from penetrating us as deeply, the accountants are still in the background busy looking at other ways to get us onto reduced terms, or self-employed contracts. In Poland for example, self-employed workers cannot join a union. I’ll just leave that one there for you to think about.

We are also our own enemy in all of this. The biggest problem with us; is that from a young age, we get our dicks hard and our pussies far too moist over this job. We’re conditioned to have this dream of flying, and to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get it. Picture it like this - If you were to ask Dave if he wants to pay €30 for a five minute boner and snail trail this evening at the local strip club, he’d probably tell you what a waste of money that was. But like any bloke, Dave loves the sight of a naked woman. So now, let’s surprise Dave by putting him in a strip club and bringing over Svetlana with 36DDs, rubbing her fanny all over him. I’m telling you, he won’t stop at €30.

From the moment we step onto a plane at the age of 8 or 9, we see those big engines, smell the fuel, hear the engines spool up, feel the seat push our arses and all the rest of it, we’re fucked. If our parents are rich, they’ll give us the money on a plate. If we’re older, we’ll play the long game, working away and saving for years, sacrificing time and potentially a family life to get into this career. It’s all great to have this passion, but all of the flight schools and airlines know this. And this is how they have capitalised.

It’s remarkable if you think about it. We’re so in love with this job that we are willing to literally do whatever it takes. What this has done, is remove the line that airlines would have never previously crossed. There is no obligation for them to make us happy. Why should they? They have the shareholders to look after, and if countries allow for certain working conditions to exist, then I’m sure every company would operate in the same way. It’s preposterous to even charge us for a fucking interview, yet it is completely legal. If any other company in another industry wanted to do it, they’d all do the same thing.

How do we find the solution? It’s difficult to see at this point in time, the demand for pilots is at an all-time low, while the supply is still increasing. The good news is that the economy will eventually bounce back. It might be a while before demand returns to circa 2019 levels, but there will be a time when pilots are needed again. You only need to rewind two years back to see the ludicrous remuneration packages that were on offer in China. And pretty much every airline that was doing road shows around the world because they simply could not get enough First Officers or Captains to keep up with the aircraft deliveries.

The solution isn’t simple, we would all have to work together to force the industry to change things. Can I really trust that every one of you guys who are desperate for this job are going to actually say no to this bullshit, and will actually tell the flight schools to fuck themselves and ensure that airline assessments aren’t paid for? Are you really going to turn down an airline that’s charging £30000 for a type rating? Didn’t think so. I was guilty of this too because I remember what it was like to finish flight school, and literally do whatever it took to get into flying. But I just want to remind you how important you are – every fucking day we turn up to work, we’re constantly making life or death decisions. All of us working together to ensure that passengers arrive in one piece. Taking off and flying through shit weather, shit ATC, shit terrain, shit airports, disruptive passengers. And imagine that we have to do this after waking up at 03:00, or even departing at 22:00 and having to fly through the night. We’re flesh and blood, yet we make key decisions to ensure that a fucking huge piece of metal brings several hundred lives up to 36000ft, and back down again safely. Yet, we have all lost all rational thinking when it comes to the shit that we agree to on our terms and conditions in this profession. It’s fucking tragic.

Let’s just look at some imaginary numbers: If Ball Bag Airways decided to recruit and train 1000 cadets this year and pay for their training and accommodation costs it would cost something like £30000. Plus an additional £10000 for hotel and food, which is a massive overestimate I know, but let’s just work that out.  It would cost the airline £40 million to train all of these new guys. Very comfortably of course, because as we all know, the Type Rating is fucking intense, so imagine having to deal with managing travel and accommodation on top of that. Anyway, let’s say this airline carried 50 million passengers this year. It would cost each passenger 80p to train these guys. That’s right, 80p. And in case you thought that you misread that, eighty pence. And to be honest, if an airline is going to train 1000 cadets, they’re going to be carrying a shit load more than 50 million passengers. Even if the airline only carried 10 million passengers, that would cost each passenger £4 per ticket.

What that one example illustrates, is that the passenger’s desire for dirt cheap tickets, wouldn’t even be an issue. It’s simplistic to frame it this way, but this just shows how far some this industry is willing to go to squeeze the maximum out of those balance sheets.

What is happening already is that legacy carriers are in the process of racing to the bottom to just to keep up, and even then, they can’t cut things as aggressively.

The biggest airlines in the world now have gotten far too big. Some even have such a strong foothold in certain countries that the governments simply allow them to get away whatever they want.

In an ideal world, we as a group need to unite, stand up by boycotting flight schools until they stop charging ridiculous fees or feeding cadets to airlines that charge for interviews and additional training costs. The unions need to work together on a continental level to pressurise the EU so that they wake the fuck up to what is going on, and start harmonising rules and regulations over flight crew working conditions in every country.

It is outrageous in this day and age, that some of the biggest airlines, with billions of pounds or euros in liquidity, can continue to want to force their employees onto shitter conditions.

Take away what you will from this post. I still love what I do because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Ultimately, we are still well paid for this job. But we are definitely entitled to that, given the amount money that we have to put on the line for it. Despite being lazy button pushers for the majority of an easy day out, I bet my left testicle that we all deep down would do anything to attain and keep this job. Unfortunately that is the double edged sword that the industry knows exactly how to use against us.