Merry-Go-Round: Floro L. Mercene
IN 2010, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will be stepping down as President of the country. In the same year, unless something is done, all the domestic airlines will stop flying because they have no pilots to fly their planes or mechanics and maintenance men to service them.
A joke? No such thing. It’s a very real possibility which no force earth can stop from happening.
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Four years from now, the country will find itself without pilots or mechanics and maintenance crew to man the airlines because they have all gone abroad to service other nations’ flying machines.
Our pilots and mechanics have all gone abroad because they have all been pirated by other airlines that offered to give them three or four times the salaries given to them by their Philippine employers.
No blandishments by their local employers or threats or sanction could stop them from leaving.
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The statistics will tell the story: Between 2000s and 2005 more than 150 experienced pilots and more than 900 aircraft mechanics have left for overseas employment, many of them taking absent without leave (AWOL) from their employers, passing through the backdoor and evading the count of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).
Department of Labor Undersecretary Danilo Cruz says that based on the recent National Manpower Summit, the average salary of a pilot in the Philippines is roughly around ,000 to ,000 a month.
Foreign airline companies are offering to double their salary which could even reach as much as ,000 a month if the pilot is really experienced.
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The airlines that will be adversely affected by this coming crisis are Philippine Airlines, Cebu Pacific, Asian Spirit, and Air Philippines.
Stella Banawis, director of the pre-employment service office of POEA, says there are only 700 pilots and 1,500 mechanics currently licensed and employed in the domestic transport industry.
PAL and Asian Spirit officials have confirmed such pricing policy by the foreign airlines and they are at a loss in competing with their high salary scales.
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The current demand worldwide for pilots stand at 1,350 per year of which l0 percent are coming from the Philippines. Mechanics have more than 700 job orders for the first three months of 2006.
Thailand, China, India, and Singapore have been actively recruiting pilots to beef up their crew as part of their refleeting program.
China alone will need some 10,000 pilots in the next 20 years and India will need 4,000 pilots five years down the road.
The growth period until 2023 will require 23,000 pilots of which 6,000 will be from the Asia Pacific region.
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A mechanic needs five to six years training to be certified by the Air Transport Office, while a pilot needs seven to 10 years to become a captain. The PAL training school puts out only 28 pilots in one year.
The local airlines spend millions of pesos to train their own pilots and mechanics, only to lose them to poaching by foreign airlines.
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PAL Vice President for Human Resources Cesar Lamberte says requiring foreign airline operators to put up their own training school could be a possible solution than for the government to issue a three to five-year moratorium on pilot deployment.
Undersecretary Danilo Cruz says the government is mulling the possibility of implementing a ban on the deployment of pilots and mechanics for three to five years, as recommended by the airlines.
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Secretary Cruz admits it may not be so easy to implement such aban but should the need arise, he is confident that DoLE Secretary Pat Santo Tomas and POEA Administrator Rosalinda Baldoz would take those stern measures.
The entire spectrum of the aviation industry, which include the biggest group of aircraft maintenance workers, had previously asked Secretary Santo Tomas to take such measures to save the airline industry.
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