Reply to: Ryanair need pilots + Monarch bust = No need to cancel Ryanair flights

[AtW]

Monarch were flying this year's flights with money received for next year's flights.

Sounds like Ponzi scheme to me

[WTFH]

Monarch were flying this year's flights with money received for next year's flights.

Isn’t that how most of the economy runs these days?

[chopper]

Would Comrade Corbyn nationalise Monarch?

He could then cap the price of flights.

Cheap flights for all are a right and not a luxury for the rich.

Cheap flights are the problem. They carried 14% more passengers in the past 12 months, but earned £100m less.

If it is costing £60m to rescue 110,000 passengers, that is £545 per passenger. Far more than any of those passengers paid for their ticket in the first place. Monarch were flying this year's flights with money received for next year's flights.

[tomtomagain]

Would Comrade Corbyn nationalise Monarch?

He could then cap the price of flights.

Cheap flights for all are a right and not a luxury for the rich.

[BrilloPad]

Bit of an irony - apparently this rescue mission is costing the UK government £60m. If they had instead just given that money to Monarch, it would have probably saved Monarch and avoided any lost flights and holidays, or lost jobs. For now, at least.

Good they did not kick the can down the road for a change.

[chopper]

So:

Monarch pilots can't just rock up at Ryanair and fly their planes. Monarch pilots will have an A320 type rating, Ryanair exclusively fly 737s. The type rating training for a 737 is about 21 days of training. And about £20k of money.

I suspect the Ryanair problems to be deeper than a temporary pilot shortage. Their pilots tend to work on a contractor basis (fancy that) whereas other airlines hire pilots on an employee basis. This is something that is going to backfire on Ryanair in the not too distant future. So Monarch pilots probably don't want to fly for Ryanair unless as a complete last resort, but then Ryanair will lead them down a "You have to stay with us for x years or repay us the training cost".

There is another licensing issue - Monarch fly more flights in the summer than the winter. Pilots are allowed to fly 100 hours per month, to a maximum of 900 hours per year. So over the summer, they are used close to the 100 hours a month limit, which means over the next 6 months, they probably can only fly 300 hours.

When Monarch went bust, their insurance ended. The leases on the 'planes would have been ended so they'd now just be returned back to their leasing companies without an airline operator. Leasing companies tend not to have Air Operator Certificates so they can't operate the flights themselves. So it isn't an option for the leasing companies to Wet Lease the planes to the CAA, as they have no pilots, and no right to operate planes. The time it would take to get these into service with another airline would probably exceed the two weeks rescue mission.

Qatar is being used for some of the repatriation flights. However, Qatar don't have the right to operate intra-EU flights, so they've actually wet leased those planes to British Airways and they are operating them on their AOC on behalf of the CAA. (Brexit angle: If after March 2019 the UK doesn't get agreement to remain in the European Common Aviation Area, then the UK will be just like Qatar, and its airlines will lose a lot of their existing rights).

Bit of an irony - apparently this rescue mission is costing the UK government £60m. If they had instead just given that money to Monarch, it would have probably saved Monarch and avoided any lost flights and holidays, or lost jobs. For now, at least. Instead they have chosen to offshore that money to Qatar, and some other non-UK airlines, and sent it into non-UK economies. The EU would have never allowed the UK government to use the money to rescue an airline instead. Illegal state subsidies and all that.

[BrilloPad]

I hear you do, kept tucked away.

And you need a microscope to see it.

[chopper]

The real difference between Airbus and other cockpits:

[northernladyuk]

I hear you do, kept tucked away.

I emptied yours out with the pencil sharpener shavings.

[WTFH]

Bring your own joy stick.

I hear you do, kept tucked away.

[northernladyuk]

I wouldn't believe anything they tell you in that pub....

Bring your own joy stick.

[greenlake]

A guy down the pub said Monachs is all Automatics and Ryanairs is manuals, so if their drivers have passed a manual test then they can drive them Ryans planes.

Straight up.

qh

I wouldn't believe anything they tell you in that pub....

[quackhandle]

Accelerate. Brake. Up. Down.

Simples....

A guy down the pub said Monachs is all Automatics and Ryanairs is manuals, so if their drivers have passed a manual test then they can drive them Ryans planes.

Straight up.

qh

[mattfx]

For those interested I am contracting at a private airport at the moment and was chatting to a few of the guys here about Monarch, Ryanair etc. None of the Ryanair fleet is more than 6 years old, and they have some 20 odd planes on order to be delivered before 2020. I doubt very much that they're in financial hot water.

Re speculation about the Monarch pilots going to Ryanair, apparently the pilot market is pretty bouyant at the moment despite being a little out of season, and most here seem to doubt anyone would want to go from working at Monarch to Ryanair.

Edit; For those interested, PPRUNE is a good source of aviation info which I stumbled upon a good couple years ago when MH370 happened: http://www.pprune.org/

[tomtomagain]

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on such matters, but isn't the landing bit quite important in the whole 'flying' process.

So I txt'd my mate, who's a BA Captain, asking him if they use Autopilot for take-off.

Here's his reply:

No. We always fly it ourselves on takeoff. Most guys hand fly the aircraft for a few minutes and then engage autopilot.

Only landings are done on autopilot - but mostly we fly those ourselves as well.

Automatic landings are only usually done in poor visibility ie. Fog.