Well Airspeed, since I have flown for 2 national flag carriers and the military, and you haven't, I would suspect my opinion might, have a little bit of validity. Since you are on American and Delta boards discussing getting hired, you look at a US legacy job as a panacea.

There are lots of happy pilots in China, and other places. They are paying you, so you do it their way. Period. It is part of being a professional.

No expat flying in China is doing it against their will. They are all volunteers, including you. If you don't like it, you can leave.

I won't rant about UAL, there are UAL boards to do that. But after flying at both UAL and a Chinese carrier, I much prefer the Chinese one, even if the money were the same.

The biggest negative in China is it is probably the least secure job in the world. That is one of the reasons it pays so much.

Good luck getting your "dream" job.

 

I never said your opinion was invalid did it? And while I didn't fly for a national airline I did fly fighters. So please stop talking about me as if you know me

 

TP, I just finished reading the thread from PPrune that you linked. This sounds EXACTLY like my experience in Japan to a tee! I so played the Mr. Humble pie attitude, studied until I could wear that plane and did every single thing they did. I followed the constant ridiculous call outs, etc.

We have I would gather to say around 10 Koreans at SZA. They ALL say the same thing about working for an airline in Korea. It sucks and had a military mafia running it. Now having Koreans leave clean Korea to come to dirty China has got to tell us something!

 

Were you a test pilot and astronaut as well?

 

No, I was neither one (:

 

You do realize your one of the VERY few actually I think the only person I have ever heard of that would prefer a Chinese airline over UAL.

Then again I am the only civilian to ever go out and fly a Mach 2 single seat combat fighter with absolutely zero training, have multiple system failures on my first flight, and break Mach 1 all at the same time.

So I guess we are not the norm are we?

Having said that I now refer to your thing about doing it their way. The Chinese way (slow as hell, way too conservative) the Japanese way (over complicated and way too anal) and then you need to find a balance where you satisfy safety, their way and the correct way.....

Yea I am a volunteer. So are the soldiers in combat but that doesn't stop them from writing about the atrocities of war now does it.....

 

CS after reading the first 50 pages in your book the uncleanliness of china reminds me of new york city. I live in one of the richest zip code in the world you can look it up, (10011) yet their are rats and mice everywhere, garbage all over the street, dilapidated old buildings that need to be tear down, and dont forget all the cockroaches everywhere. We were just like the Chinese in the fact that we put up with pollution to make our country rich and great. I just want to say we are not so different.

 

If you want to see a first world airport, vs a 3rd world one, I would suggest this. Unfortunately where I currently fly I can't be any help on this. Maybe I will search on Youtube.

Sitting in the cockpit, in ORD, La Garbage, or Heathrow, pull out your smartphone and record 30 seconds of video. That video will show hundreds of people, ground support equipment, safety equipment. It is seemingly strewn everywhere. Some moving randomly, some probably hasn't moved in 8 years. They are like garbage dumps.
The Hold Short line has a lineup of 15 jets, all burning gas.

Go to the vast majority of Chinese airports. There are aircraft on the ramp. If the aircraft is going somewhere soon, there are 3 or 4 baggage handlers loading bags, and then they completely disappear. Including ALL of their equipment. The fueler fuels, and completely disappears. There is probably only 1 tug in use (supertug), for the whole airport. 2 if there are 2 runways.
The ramp is quiet, sedate, and nearly empty. It is almost like the airport is closed.
One tug can push back enough aircraft fast enough to feed one runway. If you work for a Chinese airline, once you push back, you will not come to a stop until you lineup on the runway, 75% of the time.

All of this is done with the smallest number of ground staff you have ever seen at an airport.

There are a very, very few exceptions to this. PEK and PVD you will have a line of aircraft at the hold short, usually foreign as they screw all the foreign carriers. CAN can also have a few aircraft waiting, but usually only 2 or 3. Did I mention they screw ALL foreign carriers by making them wait till all Chinese aircraft takeoff first?

The airline I worked at had 35 aircraft at the time. They had just enough pilots and FA's to staff the planes. They had 3 schedulers for the crews. All the crew. We had 4 dispatchers. I don't know if we had more than 100-150 total employees for the rest of the airline. I don't know if we had a total of more than 30 total employees per aircraft. The vast majority of those are crew. UAL currently has about 115 employees per aircraft. I believe Southwest used to have about 40.

It was, by far, the leanest, smoothest, most reliable operation I have ever been involved with in aviation. I have never seen anything like it, before, or since. UAL, and US airports are 3rd world by comparison.

And, the medicals are insane. The air is dirty. You WILL see a woman holding her baby in her outstretched arms and watch him relieve himself. At the bottom of the air stairs. It definitely isn't perfect.

But they run an aviation system to the highest level I have ever seen, at least in some ways.

 

With the exception that We don't eat the Rats, Mice and Cockroaches

 

Hang on a minute fellas, please let's keep the ad-hominem to a minimum... If you have a point to make, I really want to read it. Appeals to the degree of astronautism of this member or that post doesn't really go very far.

Leave it to the graceful (LOL) pages of FUD to take care of any healthy doses of rudeness

That's OK. In the introduction of FUD we recognized this and tried to speak to the effect that the book was not for everyone. Besides pointing out the likelihood of offending certain folks' sensibilities, I tried to be vocal that we were not undertaking the endeavor of "...correlating wombat populations with the abundance of fruit trees in Quindao." There was a specific audience we had in mind, and that specific audience as you presciently noticed (Typhoon) is the kind of sometimes fence-riding, newbie contract pilot with 500-1000 fresh hours under his belt who is dazzled by the money offers and doesn't know what he is getting himself into. To be totally honest, I personally was that guy and I know of plenty of others who shared that experience. There is a need being addressed here, and we chose to go about it a certain way.

Despite the fact that I consider myself exceptionally open minded (believe it or not) with friends of a diverse spectrum of demographics, when one DOES get into that system over there in China and get hooked into the I.V. of crack-money, one tends to lose sight of what really matters and the conflict between I can make just one more pay-period and what the hell am I doing here begins to unravel one's coping skills and tolerance. I experienced a lot of anger personally, and I lent an ear to compadres over a beer at the pub who had just as much anger and shock at what they had gotten themselves into. IF we can do anything to address this disconnect, our mission is accomplished. We've received numerous messages of thanks and appreciation so far; I think our mission objective has been met and will persist as a certain legacy for future waves of prospective pilot merc newbies.

My thought on this, shared by many at FUD central is that America and Britain designed, developed and innovated the modren jet transport airliner (I've heard it said that the TSB of Canada has also contributed significantly, especially in the case of CFiT--there are other contributors in the Western sphere of influence). I also ran into exceptionally experienced instructors at FSI who made the same remarks; this thinking is not unique to a single, foaming at the mouth, ignorantly biased individual. To this end, the Boeing and Airbus aeroliners, emulated by a "new" wave of manufacturers like Embraer and Canadair, have been designed with a flight deck culture in mind that transcends and leaves behind local culture. Our "side" invented and developed this stuff, I'd say we have a right to declare what is the standard and what is not; I don't go for that whole "we should be ashamed because we have been innovators and world leaders" bull-ogna and give up the farm. No. I'm also not saying that America is not above critique; but, this is NOT that thread. I am sure it exists elsewhere for people to go pontificate on... I'm pontificating about other things here.

Quick question along this line of debate: I'm curious, why is it that the Chinese have been hiring so many foreign pilots anyhow? Why are they offering wages of such grandiose proportions?


Now, in some ways you are right: to point out that there are droves of (slaves) people walking through traffic cleaning up the roads in Tianjin has nothing to do with flight deck culture is 100% correct. To say that harvesting organs has nothing to do with culture on deck is... 90% correct. To say that kids are taking a dump in the aisle of row 18 has nothing to do with culture on deck... well, we're starting to get some traction: the acorn does not fall far from the tree. Smoking, sleeping, talking on your phone... these are things I've seen aplenty on deck in China, and it speaks of a disconnect between leaving your local culture at the door and entering the flight deck as a disciplined individual, ready to fly.

I'm not saying problems are absent from flight decks in America; what I AM asking is whether YOU are prepared to get your wee-wee slapped time and again in a foreign theater of operations where your only recourse is, as Probe pointed out, leaving. Are you brave enough to go over there in the first place; if you can't hack it, are you brave enough to leave; can you hack it when they tell you to go?

C.S.