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.

After being delayed several times, the long awaited decision was made public at the end of 2016: Lufthansa will buy the remaining shares of Brussels Airlines.
Reassuring messages concerning the working conditions have followed as it is often the case in such a takeover. However, our experience showed us that we have to be careful and monitor the future decisions in order to avoid transfer of production, atypical forms of employment, lowering of social conditions and so on…

It is obvious that all concessions and efforts made by the pilots since 2012 convinced Lufthansa to invest in our company. We are waiting for the promises made by the company at that time to be honored.

We have also noticed an increased numbers of questions concerning pilots’ medical problems and insurances. We are closely monitoring the situation since more and more pilots are confronted with the problem and we expect to come with pilot friendly solutions in the future. Our BeCA project of setting up a country wide peer support program might be helpful in this respect.

Mumbai flights will be operated from end of March on. Some issues have been identified by the pilot delegation such as flight duties very close to the maximum allowed for a standard crew, climatic environment and the lack of previous experience in this part of the world for most of the crews.

Good news for our Belgian Jobseekers: given the high crew need of the last 2 years, several ab initio pilots have been hired. Some of them have now received permanent contracts and a new pilot selection has started in January. We expect this positive trend will continue in the coming months with the promised Long Haul expansion.

Speaking of employment, there are several subcontracted aircraft in the Brussels Airlines livery operating flights for the company (BMI Regional E145, FlyBE Q400 – both UK AOCs) and in the coming weeks Cityjet Sukhoi Superjets – Irish AOC). Given the quite high numbers of contract pilots hired on A320 our association fears that the company drifts towards atypical forms of employment usually present in Low Cost companies. The problem will have to be investigated and tackled in cooperation with the company pilot delegation.

Christophe Sambre, VP Brussels AIrlines