Since their launch in 1985, Emirates Airlines has invested millions of dollars in advertising and public relations to promote their brand as a luxury airline committed to delivering service excellence, innovation, financial responsibility and employee diversity. In reality, the company is severely mismanaged due to bad management, policies, and practices. As a result, a large number of senior Emirates pilots are expecting a major accident to happen in the near future. Why?
- Over-worked pilots resulting in fatique while flying
- Emirates Top Management is out of touch with reality
- Emirates Medium Management presents major deficiencies in leadership -quality and skills
- Management style: leading by means of menace and presumption, hardly involved in day-to-day management but will react and make decisions without all the facts; contempt of Flight Duty Time Limitations.
- Breach of contract
- Intentionally passing on untrue information
- Pilots are not trusting the Airline anymore
Ill Treatment of Employees
The low moral is evident everywhere. 80% of the supervisors have lower educational qualifications than the pilots. Moreover, they treat the pilots like children as they severely lack management and people skills. Unfortunately, they don’t realize the fact that the airline would and will not exist without experienced pilots. However, their behavior towards them is inadequate, very often arrogant and disrespectful. For many pilots the ill and unfair treatments from their superiors have reached beyond the pain threshold. As a result, nearly 100 pilots have resigned from Emirates over the last year and the number will rise as soon as more jobs become available. All Expatriate Pilots came to Dubai expecting that the contract which has been signed between the parties would be honored. Not for Emirates. As the company is government owned with unlimited power, they change the contract to their advantages as they like with notices given by email. In the over the last year:
- Paid leave has been degrade to unpaid leave
- Several cutbacks in the family insurance package
- Simulator training / OPC´s is not paid and not valued in the flying hours
- The limit to reach the bonus payment for overtime has been raised from 80 hrs to 93 hrs
But the major breach is yet to come. Pilots are housed in company provided accommodation. These houses (they name them villa) are low budget quality concrete blocks with poor insulation. Per contract the utility costs are covered by Emirates. These houses are not equipped with a calibrated water- and electricity meter (outside the houses, meters are installed in secure cabinets with no access by the tenants.) Via e-mail notice the pilots have been informed, that they have partially to pay back utility costs backdated to April 2009. Households with children have to expect yearly income losses of 12000 DHS (~ 3300 US$) and more.
Disregard for Flight Safety
- The actual rest times between flights are often reduced to an unsafe minimum,
- Flight hours reach 100 per month and more
- Crew have to face sudden roster changes with dramatic impact on their rest pattern the chance to spend vital leave with their families over the school holiday periods have been rejected
- Unrealistic Block times/Flight times used to create legal turnaround patterns might end up in maximum Flight Duty Time infringement.
- Captain’s discretion is expected, ACARS messages sent to the flight decks from the fleet management to exceed even max permitted discretion times, just to recover the aircraft back into Dubai, causes risks.
- The UAE Aviation Authority is under control of the same Sheik who runs Emirates Airlines. Whatever Emirates wants to do will be covered up.
- Flight Safety Reports written by pilots will be rewritten or filtered out if they do not comply with the Leaders Philosophy. Pilots will be called into office and threatened.
- Daily changes related to Handbooks, Procedures, Operational Manuals and Checklists, printed as so named “Flight Crew Notices“, each of them with a different period of effectiveness, (at the moment more than 150 are effective), overwrite the official regulations approved and known by national and international authorities. This unstable operation, difficult for the pilots to keep up, compromises safety
With the high fatigue rate, Emirates Crew Planning is also under pressure as not enough pilots are available to fill the cockpit seats. The consequence: implemented paragraphs in the Operational Manual which regulate duty patterns to are avoided and ignored. In case the maximum Flight Duty time is not adequate to allow a certain night turn around pattern, an “extension variation” will be created, and of course approved by the local Aviation Authority.
Conclusion
With the constant physiological pressure created by Emirates and having to worry about whether you will be fired if you don’t follow the way Emirates Management is interpreting the rules, has become unbearable for the majority of pilots. As a result, for the expatriate Pilot, Emirates has becomes an uninteresting package:
- The airlines operational strategy is unsafe
- The treatment towards Expatriates became unpredictable and disrespectful
- The moral and motivation in the pilot pool is reaching the bottom, whoever can afford to resign, will resign, the majority of pilots feel trapped and misused
As pilots have not the right to speak up in the United Arab Emirates and of course not in Emirates Airlines. - We are looking for facts, true incidents to publish. - Write us; help us to protect our Profession as Pilots. (pilots.facts@gmail.com) Airline pilots are the beginning and the end of the chain making an airline successful. An airline can operate without managers, or easily replace them, but nor replace their pilots-expertise on a daily basis, neither even exist without them. We are a responsible and reliable group of professionals and we expect to be treated as that.
