If you are lucky enough to pay your dues early on in your flying career and you finally get to see the fruits of your labor, what is it like to be an airline pilot captain at the top of the pilot seniority list for a major international airline (like Emirates for example)?
Like what would the salary be and what would the lifestyle of a senior major international airline captain be like? Any other perks and benefits?
Hmmmm.
To be honest if you are lucky early in your career you get on with a U.S. major and stay there for 35-40 years without getting furloughed; going through a bankruptcy; or getting screwed in a seniority integration. One only ends up at a place like Emirates if one of the above three things happens to them or they were otherwise stuck at a regional during the dark days of the early to mid 2000s.
I was pretty senior at Emirates. #500 of 3500 when I left and was a Standards Captain* on the B777 so had pretty much the best schedule one could devise on a monthly basis. Home 25 nights/month; flew an average of 30 hours/month; and did maybe ten sim sessions. I could pick a 5 day block of time off anywhere in the month, each month. I got one trip of my choosing every month (except ultra-long haul or trips over 6 days). My trips were almost always final line checks for upgrading F.O.s or for new hire F.O.s because that's what Standards Captains did. My sim sessions were a mix of initial type rating checks; recurrent training/check; new instructor training; recurrent instructor training; or the final line oriented exam for an upgrading F.O. The really nice thing about my job is that I had awesome bosses in the training department who backed up anything I did and every decision I made in regards to a student. I also had an incredibly talented peer group that worked really well together. You can't put a price on those last two points, they made job satisfaction off the charts.
A senior Emirates captain makes the U.S. equivalent of $300,000/year when you factor in all of the benefits and tax deductions. Probably a little more. I took a job back in the States for $200,000/year and it was a massive pay cut on an after tax basis.
The Emirates pilots started a club where we paid dues of $30/month and pooled that money to buy memberships at many of the good gyms and beach clubs in town. That meant you could enjoy the facilities of some very high end gyms and beach clubs for very low cost.
Travel benefits on Emirates are okay. If travelling single as a senior employee one could almost always get into First Class. I can't tell you the number of times I got the last seat on an airplane in First Class because economy and business would go out full and only Captains and senior management had access to First Class seats. If travelling with a family on standby tickets it wasn't so nice because now you're stuck in business when the kids are young so would have to be very careful looking for availability. Many people travelling to the UK or Australia had major problems getting a whole family onto the airplane on the dates they wanted.
Now, all of that said. There was a good time to be at Emirates and that was from when they started until about 2014. It was really good up until 2008/2009 when the flying wasn't so heavy, but during the economic crisis they arbitrarily increased the normal monthly hours from the low 80s to the low 90s. Doesn't sound like much, but it was a huge increase in workload. The other thing they did that hurt even more is they stopped counting vacation days towards that monthly flying time. I forget what the figure was but let's say 2:30/day for vacation towards that monthly maximum. If you had 14 days of vacation that would be 35 hours. So the remaining 16 days of the month might get scheduled for 40-45 hours of flying. When they increased the monthly flying and did away with the vacation credit you could sometimes have 7 days of vacation in a month and still fly 90 hours!! Then they started forcing 4 day vacation blocks into a pilot's line and basically counted them as days off while the pilot still did a full month with only another 4-5 days off. There are countless other examples of changes that have been made for the worse over the years.
Since I left at the end of 2013 it has only gotten worse and worse. Pilots are leaving in droves now. Qatar, which used to be the worst of the Gulf airlines is now the clear choice of places to go as long as you go on a widebody. There really is no good reason to go to an overseas airline for a U.S. citizen anymore. It made a lot of sense back in the early 2000s and up until about 2010/2011 while the U.S. carriers were stagnating, but not anymore.
*Standards Captain is a Type Rating Examiner who also does the training and checking of all the other Type Rating Instructors and Examiners.
