That is possibly true in the practical sense (the head contractor will be just a shell company) but there is a general approach in taxation which enables setting aside any intermediate steps which have no commercial purpose.
This is a complex area and obviously I know almost nothing about it, not being a tax specialist, but it is also very old – at least 30 years, in the UK. I think googling on Rossminster (1980) will get you started 
Do we know which jurisdiction Ryanair pilots are working under?
Peter wrote:
Do we know which jurisdiction Ryanair pilots are working under?
- 130 million passengers
- hundreds of airplanes
- thousands of pilots
and the question cannot be answered.
Take a look at what happened to (Fly)Niki.
Austrian AOC, Austrian Ltd. Company, Everyone employed in Austria, unionized with collective working agreement. Ryanair came in. First the mechanics were given the option to sign a new contract or be fired. Then the pilots. When the authority took a closer look, the airplanes went on 9H- (Malta) register and AOC, and the staff was given the „option“ to accept the new contract or be out of a job.
The official reason from Ryanair was something along that the union (not limited to representing Niki employees, but many other branches as well) wasn’t signing the new proposed contract from Ryanair.
The union wouldn’t sign it because the new contract proposed cabin crew wages that were several hundred euros below what is considered poverty line in Austria (iirc basic pay was 700-800€ per month).
Ryanair said „either sign or we close down“ and off they went to Malta. Now the same planes fly in and out of Vienna as before, but working conditions have been slashed.
I heard 15€ per hour for a 320 first officer… (unverified!).
The next step has already been announced. The 320 fleet will be phased out. I’d guess the next „generous offer“ will be to pay 30000€ for a 737 type to keep a job, or else…
[ text cleaned up to remove defunct references ]
Mooney_Driver wrote:
and what do 1500 hours in a C150 help?
Getting experience flying around with your hand on an actual yoke might have prevented the AF 447 disaster where no one in the deck seemed able to recognise a stall.
Snoopy wrote:
Lufthansa closed this (Bremen) by the way….hundreds of unemployed now (CEO = kill all the good jobs).
Exactly! What else can Lufthansa do to communicate to the market “we do not need new pilots for the foreseeable future – no – really not – not at all”.
At some point in time, you can no longer help an adult answering to that “Well, that is only the Lufthansa management view. What do these guys know about how many pilots Lufthansa needs in 2 years. I’ll bet 100k on the idea if Lufthansa is wrong – and if I loose these 100k I can still complain how unfair the labor market for young pilots is and how badly Lufthansa treats me as they did not tell me earlier that they don’t want me (ok, they did but in 2 years from now perhaps nobody will remember and even if there are enough people out there that will agree that airlines are always bad…”
Ryan and others get away with this because there are people willing to work under these conditions and because due to the open sky conditions in Europe, local airports can not prevent them from doing this.
The only way to stop it would be to organize the pilots and cabin crew (as well as ground staff) in a strong union and to fight them on a European level. National legislation won’t hold as they will simply transfer to a country which has less strict employment rules.
Neither will happen. Youngsters will continue to flock to their recruiting events and pay the outrageous sums to get behind the controls of an airliner.
Buckerfan wrote:
Getting experience flying around with your hand on an actual yoke might have prevented the AF 447 disaster where no one in the deck seemed able to recognise a stall.
You can get that with much less hours on small planes. What is fatal however is if small plane instruction is totally abandoned, such as in certain multi crew licensing schemes where the first time a pilot flies is on an airliner. If you look at the integrated flight training airlines used to have, they all passed through PPL, MEP, to CPL/IR and eventually ATPL. At the time, 200 hours were required to get a CPL/IR, which usually meant the candidates would get their PPL, then let loose on training missions to go to 100 hrs or so, then start their IR and after 150 hrs (IR) fly again for another 50 hours to gain 200 for their CPL. In the concentrated way they did that, it gave them all they needed on small planes. Their ATPL’s were frozen until they reached 1000 hrs I think it was, or even longer until they upgraded to command.
In the US, this rule makes sense as there IS a viable way that youngsters can get their 1500 hours required for the ATPL. In Europe that is impossible.
AF447 tore up a big box of worms and showed brutally in what shape flight training is. Also it showed major deficiencies in Airbus’s training syllabus, primarily because nobody ever thought of unreliable airspeed to develop at cruising altitude. From what I hear, unusual attitude e.t.c. has become a major refresher issue with almost all airlines these days.
I think AF447 is a more complex lesson than just hand flying. I am sure the two guys could hand-fly an A330. After all, they had an LPC every 6 months. Even I could hand fly a 737 and go down an ILS, in a full motion sim. Not well but well enough and that was after ~1.5hrs.
To me, the real lesson is that most airline pilots have poor aircraft systems knowledge or, to put it less kindly, are not particularly bright. Increasing cockpit automation makes it possible to employ people with less and less technical understanding, which the airlines want because it reduces overall costs by reducing recruitment washout. This is ok until “something new” goes wrong and all the holes in the cheese line up just right.
I shared a cheap hotel in Bournemouth with a load of students when I did a few days of (not actually legally needed) ground school for my JAA IR conversion and listening to that lot doing their “shared homework” was quite amazing. In the land of the blind, the eye-eyed man was definitely the King. They were in some FTO at EGHH. Maybe the one I was at… the JAA IR theory was unbelievable junk. This scene makes it clear that Ryanair will always get a long queue of applicants willing to work for peanuts.
The recipe is simple enough:
Ryanair get a high despatch rate partly because they have a brand new fleet most of the time. As “African” ops have shown over decades, you could fly a big jet with practically no maintenance for many years, until things start to actually fall off.
Peter wrote:
I think AF447 is a more complex lesson than just hand flying. I am sure the two guys could hand-fly an A330.
They did prove otherwise.
Peter wrote:
To me, the real lesson is that most airline pilots have poor aircraft systems knowledge or, to put it less kindly, are not particularly bright. Increasing cockpit automation makes it possible to employ people with less and less technical understanding, which the airlines want because it reduces overall costs by reducing recruitment washout. This is ok until “something new” goes wrong and all the holes in the cheese line up just right.
Airbus for a long time choose to keep pilots “underinformed” but that changed over the years. Air France had their first lesson of that in Habsheim.
AF447 was the result of a misguided procedure for unreliable airspeed. Airbus never considered that airspeed could become unreliable at those altitudes, so there was only one procedure for low altitude: To fly a given pitch and power. That is what they did. However, at those altitudes, the result is very bad: It meant a massive pitch up and initially climb right into coffin corner. Add to that, the protections to keep them from stalling went south the moment the unreliable airspeed came up. So they had no alfa floor protection nor anything else to keep them from stalling.
The correct proceedure in this situation would be to maintain pitch and thrust as present before the airspeed is lost. In the Airbus, this means to nail the pitch and to take the engines out of CLB/Autothrottle and manually set the thrust present before the incident as ATHR might do stupid things. Which is why it’s a pretty good idea to write down thrust parameters whenever a change of altitude occurrs or every hour.
However, that still does not explain why they never even considered lowering the nose, seeing that the airplane fell out of the sky.
Peter wrote:
make sure there is a good pilot in the LHS for a long while (that is the case in the 1st World, not necessarily elsewhere)
And exactly that failed: The experienced guy was not in his seat but only came later from the crew bunk.
Since, Airbus has changed the proceedures. Also this crash was a massive wake up call to every Airbus pilot out there, not that many would have made that mistake, but it showed brutally the limitations of an otherwise brilliant design. Unusual attitude recovery and similar situations which lead to this crash were introduced to the syllabi of sim rides.
Exactly! What else can Lufthansa do to communicate to the market “we do not need new pilots for the foreseeable future – no – really not – not at all”.
Lufthansa is keeping the self sponsored flight school at Rostock open. . .
Funny thing. Ryanair tried for a long time to get a foot hold in Norway. They had to pack it up some years ago. Wizzair tried lately, now they are packing up as well
