Nigerian pilots are looking beyond the country for greener pasture, as there are indications that China and other wealthy nations are poaching some pilots that have been thrown out of job. Chinese airlines need to hire almost 100 pilots a week for the next 20 years to meet skyrocketing travel demand.
Facing a shortage of candidates at home, carriers are dangling lucrative pay packages at foreigners with cockpit experience and Nigerian pilots are billed to benefit.Giacomo Palombo, a former United Airlines pilot, said he’s being bombarded every week with offers to fly Airbus A320s in China.
Regional carrier, Qingdao Airlines, promises as much as S318,000 ($415,000) a year. Sichuan Airlines, which flies to Canada and Australia, is pitching $302,000. Both airlines say they’ll also cover his income tax bill in China.
Air traffic over China is set to almost quadruple in the next two decades, making it the world’s busiest market, according to Airbus Group SE. Start-up carriers barely known abroad are paying about 50 per cent over what some senior captains earn at Delta Air Lines and they’re giving recruiters from the US to New Zealand free rein to fill their captains’ chairs.
With some offers reaching $26,000 a month in net pay, pilots from emerging markets, including Brazil and Russia, can quadruple their salaries in China, said Dave Ross, Las Vegas-based president of Wasinc International.
Wasinc is recruiting for over a dozen mainland carriers, including Chengdu Airlines, Qingdao Airlines and Ruili Airlines. Recruits preferring to live outside China earn a bit less, but are offered free flights home to visit family members. Also on the negotiating table are: signing bonuses, overtime pay and contract-completion payouts. Earlier this year, Ross saw the monthly pay check of a pilot at Beijing Capital Airlines who earns $80,000.
“I looked at that and thought: ‘Man, I’m in the wrong line of business,’” Ross said from Vienna, where he was interviewing candidates for Chengdu Airlines. “They can live like kings.” Nigerian pilots with experience and considerable flying hours may benefit.
Already, some of them have started dusting their licences for possible recruitment into China’s aviation industry while others have applied for job placement. Over 600 Nigerian pilots are said to be out of job. This figure comprise those that graduated many years ago from Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT) but have never worked and those who trained overseas; the other group is that comprising pilots who were engaged but lost their jobs due to economic recession that has hit the nation. Before now, over 500 pilots had been roaming the streets, but that figure has gone up in the last one year, as airlines find it extremely difficult to carry out scheduled operations.
A former pilot with Bristow Helicopters, Capt Dung Rwang Pam, told this newspaper that the sad aspect of it is that there are many pilots in Nigeria that have never flown since they graduated, noting that by now they should have been elevated to the position of captains if they had been flying.
He said that for those who are good, experienced and still have age on their side, they would easily be poached by not only airlines in China, but carriers in America, Europe and other parts of the world. A former Director General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr. Harold Demuren, had recently warned that the poaching of Nigerian pilots and engineers to Europe and the Middle East would pose a real problem for domestic and African carriers in five years’ time if left unchecked.
Demuren said pilots and engineers were being offered thrice the amount of salaries currently being received in the country by foreign airlines. He said this was a dangerous signal not only for the aviation sector but also for the nation’s economy, adding that for this reason, many domestic airline operators in the country have refused to train pilots for fear that they would be taken away by foreign airlines; instead going for the ones already trained by others.
