Below the report by your BeCA Vice-President of the main events that happened in Brussels Airlines since the first edition of 2016 of our Cockpit Flash.

We are now 9 months after TNT Airways was sold to ASL Aviation Group and became ASL Airlines Belgium (ASLB). This transition was led by the ASLB CEO ad interim Colin Grant. The ASL Group Chief Executive Hugh Flynn announced recently that Ulf Weber (from Aerologic) will take over the position of ASLB CEO. Colin Grant will continue to drive the strategy as ASL European Airlines’ CEO.

B777 Phase-out Plan

In September 2016, the phase-out plan of the B777 fleet was officially announced during the Company Council. It was confirmed that the whole fleet (3 aircraft) and part of their production will be leaving ASLB to join Fedex’s fleet between 4 January 2017 and 15 February 2017. ASLB management announced that employment will be maintained as agreed in the CLA negotiated back in December 2015. Transfer to other fleets would start and therefore all the upcoming promotions were cancelled. ASLB reiterated the fact that long-haul continuation within the company was their top priority and that potential new business opportunities were in the pipeline. Unfortunately, there was a risk that it will not materialize before the 777 fleet leaves the company. Therefore. many 777 colleagues face tough decisions in the short term, as accepting a transfer to the short-haul means a pay cut up to 30% after the first year.

From the moment the phase out was announced until very recently, the short term future of our 777 colleagues was not very clear. This situation had a huge impact on the mood of our 777 colleagues. They have been reporting to the company doctor a growing uneasy feeling and anguish about that uncertainty. Based on those reports, the company doctor raised this issue to CPPT council members and emphasized to the management it was urgent to communicate as the last aircraft was meant to leave two weeks later. Coincidence or not, four days later, ASL Holding invited all ASLB staff members to a roadshow organized on 2 February 2017 to present group updates, key planning and upcoming events.

B747 & B757 Fleets

The 747 pilots are not at ease either.

The next deadline is approaching. One of our 747s, OO-THC flying currently on the Emirates contract, is planned to leave the company in June and OO-THD in December.
Should the worst case scenario happen on the 747, it is not sure that short-haul expansion would be sufficient to absorb the long-haul pilots. And if so, this would leave short-haul pilots without any promotion for years.

Moreover, a few weeks ago, ASLB announced that 4 of the newly acquired 737s will be registered on ASLI (Irish) AOC and not the Belgian ASLB AOC for cost reasons and flexibility. Parc Aviation has recently published job vacancies for 737 ASLI on their website. Such a chain of events raises a lot of questions amongst our colleagues and complex legal issues as well. Pilots fear this is the first move from ASL Holding that would potentially jeopardize their current working conditions.
In addition, pilots are worried about the limitation imposed by the scope clause of Fedex pilots restricting the size of ASLB aircraft to maximum 737-800, which limits drastically any expansion should the Fedex network require bigger aircraft in the future and as Fedex is already flying ten B757s and ordered much more, it makes 757 pilots not at ease either.

Despite the fact ASLB has a multi-year (more than 5) air transport service agreement with FedEx, short-haul pilots fear to be used as a temporary patch for a bigger long term plan from which they will be left aside.

Training

There have been growing concerns over the past months within ASLB about the way pilot training is handled. This has been identified as a major source of stress and pilots have raised concerns about the way failure was treated and handled.

To help guarantee a fair treatment for everyone, unions and management concluded in December a collective agreement to set up a new remediation procedure. There is still a lot of work ahead to change mentalities and come back to a more serene atmosphere, but let’s hope that this agreement will contribute to restore some trust, which is a necessary condition in any training system.

Social climate

People report suffering from lack of consideration and respect. Union tried hard to peacefully negotiate proposals that could improve the climate and solve part of these issues up to a point they hit a wall. The next step was obviously to organise a general assembly to explain to pilots and employees the situation and get a mandate to whether or not take further steps in a harsher direction.

The issues we have are complex and technical but essential. We are dealing with pilot’s career management, crew training, working conditions, salary grid, training, compliance with conventions and human resource policy as well as open attacks and harassment on union members.

Union delegates submitted a list of claims to all employees and pilots attending the general assembly. Two questions were asked: “Do you support the claims?” and “Are you ready to fight for it?”

In the end, 100% of the pilots supported the claims and 99% were ready to fight for it. We came back to the negotiation table with a clear mandate from the workforce. After 15 hours of negotiations, the unions obtained 90% out of the list of claims in the form of agreement protocols. These protocols should be turned into Collective labour agreement before Q2 2017.

ASL Holding Roadshow at ASLB

On February 2, ASL Holding announced they were going forward on long-haul and accepted to activate the 747 business case prepared by ASLB requiring 2 additional 747s. A third one might be required for another opportunity in Asia. ASL is continuously hunting for new opportunities. ASLB management does not hide long-haul cargo business is a risk nowadays. Fuel price and currency value evolution are highly volatile factors that may have a big impact on the business case.

“Success will be determined by how we perform and how the market will react to the product we are selling”. “ASL Holding decided to take that risk”, ASLB management explained. “It should be seen as a very positive key milestone from a pilot perspective and motivate them to stay around working with us as we are now lacking pilots.”

Conclusion

Following the Voice survey organized by TNT Express a few years ago, our management finally presented last month an action plan which basically proposes to reform our company culture. Even though this is a long time wish amongst the pilot community (especially for the training side), changing culture is a big ambition and won’t be easy. Tough challenges are ahead but in the end ASLB Management has no other option than to bring back hope, pride and serenity or we do anticipate a massive exodus of pilots for better skies and this lack of experience workforce might endanger even more ASLB’s fragile transition from an integrator subsidiary airline to a fully independent and neutral ACMI service provider.

This transition is hard, challenges are huge and future changes related to ASL integration process won’t most probably be easy either but many of us still think ASLB has enough great assets to recover and we are still ready to fight to make our airline nice again.

Rémi Thirion, VP ASL Airlines Belgium