Interesting thread to see develop. Some good thoughtful posts on both sides of the debate.

A thoughtful article here that some should consider.

I'm certainly not a big proponent of NAI. Their pay kind of sucks and they treat crews poorly so they get a thumbs down for that. That said, the anti-NAI crowd need to look at reality a little. The above linked article does a good job at some reality checking.

The emotional, "Flag of Convenience" and "we're all doomed like merchant seamen" is a little hysterical in my opinion. You can crew a boat with the hundreds of thousands of uneducated Philippino, Indonesian, Eastern European; etc workers since they are positions that require little training. Exceptions being for ship's captain and perhaps engineer. I'm just not seeing a hundred thousand qualified Philippino, Indonesian, etc qualified airline pilots who are going to steal your jobs with this "flag of convenience model". I also don't see that many being able to be trained since the cost to do so is so high.

Western Europe has too much trouble with rich English kids spending over a 100,000 Euros to get a commercial-instrument-multi then throwing another 35,000 Euros at an EASA B737 or A320 type rating so they can take a job at Ryanair and EasyJet. Asian airlines use expats or have ab-initio programs because their population just does not have all those rich kids like the UK or USA. Nor do their militaries pump out enough qualified pilots on a yearly basis to fulfill the demand from airlines.

Another article worth looking at, and perhaps a much larger threat to U.S. airline pilot jobs that at least DAL pilots might have a chance of countering, yet it doesn't even warrant a whisper here in APC: China Eastern expansion.

As usual ALPA is way off target as to what the threat is and they are mis-directing the membership's energy on battles they have little hope of winning.


Typhoonpilot