Month on month off has been a pipe dream for at least the last decade. Will never happen. That would mean ceding control. During the last 18 months I haven't flown with a single pilot who was "content or enjoying the adventure." Three years ago there were quite a few that fit that description. Now people are tolerating or working on an exit strategy. Those that are stuck are making the best of it. Plan on 90+ hours each and every month. You get no credit for ground duties towards your monthly maximums. Now we get about USD$100 for a sim event. Might pay for a few trips to Starbucks.

I have countless friends who have been given 80-95 hour months during a month with at least one week of vacation. You get zero pay credit for vacation. It is really just a guaranteed block of 7 days off in a row. You might get 3 or 4 days off for the rest of the month. So you could have 10 days of vacation plus 90 hours of hard time and get the exact same pay check as someone with no vacation and 90 hours of flying. You are expected to go into Captains discretion if it's required. Duty times were just modified to increase the start of duty time to 1:25 before the flight commences. They cleverly increased the maximum duty times on variation flights by an additional 30 minutes. So net change is a negative. Give some take a little more. Productivity is king here and nothing short of a massive management change would alter that. Think loooooong and hard before coming to the middle east. If you want an adventure go to South East Asia. I hear Vietnam is nice.

Spoke with a Ryanair 737 guy yesterday who got a cold call from an Emirates recruiter. The recruiter why giving him the hard sell on Emirates, telling him how great it was and why his family would love living in Dubai. He said it was almost like a telemarketer call, every time he said he was not interested the recruiter would ask why and then try and counter with reasons why it was good.

Two other guys in this conversation (took place while on a lunch break at an interview...) have had friends who had also had similar calls in the past few weeks.

Sounds like desperation is setting in.

We were just talking to a fellow crewmember. Told him to stay away from EK. If he wanted to live in Dubai for the lifestyle, just keep flying for us and move to Dubai. We have LOTS of pilots that live overseas.

I hope you are joking. No sane person would choose to live in Dubai if any place in the first world is available.

Apparently on the 380, the roster is not that bad.... (yet)!

What is the nationality makeup of the pilots there?

You name the nationality, they probably have at least a few of them. I've met probably 30 different nationality pilots from EK, and that's just with casual socializing with them in DXB and abroad.

Their FlyDubai subsidiary operates as an airline within the airline. I have done three round trips with FlyDubai from DBX to Kandahar and Bagram. Worst airline I have ever flown on, with the last trip outbound from Bagram two days ago. The crew overheated the breaks on landing and we took a thirty minute break cooling delay before departure. I could feel them flying too slow and I think they nearly stalled the airplane twice.

Worse than that, the daily trip that was delayed due to the Emirates crash last week, the FlyDubai crew did not provide even water to the passengers during a four hour period. When they arrived at an alternate airport and bussed the passengers, the guys had been trapped on the B737 for fourteen hours. One guy, complaining about chest and back pain the last three hours was not provided medical assistance. When he finally collapsed walking into the terminal from the bus, he was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, when he died from a blood clot.

Go anywhere but those two places.

OMG! From everywhere......! Just about every expat pilot gig is like that....., and that makes it very interesting actually, I've been very fortunate to fly with pilots from very diverse backgrounds and I have learned a lot from many of them...., hopefully I've taught them something along the way as well...!:D

Huggy,

I've only flown EK as a passenger, but it's common to hear an announcement of 20 distinct languages spoken by the cabin crew. I flew with an ex-Saudia captain who said in 20 years he met 47 nationalities there.

GF