In his recent letter regarding the profit share, our CEO stated his concerns regarding staff numbers, safety and efficiency of our operation. What Mr. Forson might have missed is the fact that this has been our main concern since the beginning of the year.
Although these key issues have been pointed out by ALPL over and over again, he and Flight Operations Management failed to timely put measures into place to prevent a further deterioration of the situation. Furthermore, we have seen another aircraft placed into operations despite lacking crews to operate the current fleet.
In the past months, numerous recommendations made by the Aviation Safety Department in respect to;
- Two sector augmented crew flights near the maximum FDP
- Standard Crew FDPs that operate to and from PANC and
- Standard Crew FDPs that approach the legal FDP limit and/or encroach the WOCL
have been ignored. In addition, rosters are changing daily, further hindering every pilot’s ability to plan their rest. Also, Crew Control is sending block SMS messages to pilots on off-days asking whether they would like to work on their days off.
The CWA, with all its misgivings with an obvious advantage to management, is not being respected and flights are either planned into the CODs without the consent of the pilots, planned to arrive less than 12 hours before the first VAC day or rosters are changed without respecting rest or flight time limitations.
We are addressing this with Human Resources and asking them to ensure that the CWA is respected.
At the same time, it came to our attention, that members of EXCOM are appearing at the recurrent ground school, telling pilots, that they are not working enough and that management will try to align the old CWA working conditions with the new conditions in order to gain more efficiency. This gives an indication about the real focus and concerns regarding the staff and the actual disdain for the work carried out.
While other companies tried to counteract this pilot shortage by significantly improving pilot conditions with major two-digit salary increases, more time off and other benefits, this demeanor further deteriorates an already critical situation. The fact that even road-shows fail to raise a sufficient number of new First Officers who are willing to take on the challenge flying for Cargolux under the “new” conditions is an indication that we might have reached a tipping-point with respect to pilot work-load, CWA conditions and competitiveness of our remuneration package.
We ask you to remain vigilant. If you notice any roster non-conformity please send a polite email to Crew Control asking them to modify your roster to respect the CWA before you accept any changes.
Please also log into the new ALPL website where all relevant documents and Debrief videos have been uploaded for your reference. As always, if you have any questions we are doing our best to answer them as soon as we can. Send your concerns directly to cvboard@alpl.lu.
