He was also telling me about what normally happens when a pilot hasn't been flying enough due to leave/rostering and having to do simulator work and flying with "supervision" to become "current/recent" (I don't remember the exact term). I cannnot begin to imagine the difficulty of getting all the pilots back to the "standard" once international flying starts up again. I wonder what they'll do with the A380/787, bring them on domestic routes just so the pilots can accumulate hours in the air? Unless doing empty leg training flights would be an option?
My bet is that the A380s will never return. Even if they do, by the time that happens, it will be much the same as introducing a new type, so it will take considerable time. They will probably be a need to fly a bunch of short, empty sectors to get the initial people back up to speed. This was done on Airbus’s aircraft, in France, last time, and amounted to about 10 hours per pilot. Once you have that group back, subsequent flights will be done with passengers. It’s very unlikely that it would be flown to any extent domestically.
Those that I know who have taken VR in other areas, have got their payments
I know that the ones who decided to actually retire have been paid. One stopped by for a coffee the other day. But, for the big VR group, I don’t think their effective end of service has happened yet. This month or next, I think.
On a different note, many of the pilots have history in the outback, and on various farms. One of them came up early in the piece, offering a mass of work for people willing to learn how to drive the huge wheat harvesters. Quite a few took him up, and the feedback is that they’ve all had a very interesting, albeit dirty, time. They’ve been able to get them up to speed on these very expensive machines very quickly, and the ingrained caution of bending anything has worked well for them.
A problem that many have encountered is that employers are wary of pilots as a group, simply because they believe that they’ll leave them for even the sniff of a flying job. That hasn’t necessarily been the outcome though, as I know of a number of people who have knocked QF back on a partial return to flying, as would be the wrong thing to do by the people who have helped them out with employment.
