Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways will have rehired 180 local pilots by February, with plans to bring on ‘several hundred’ more
- In addition to the ongoing efforts to rehire laid-off pilots over the coming year, the airline is also planning to restart its cadet programme
- Pilots who spoke to the Post say there has been a ‘significant uptick’ in resignations amid tightened local rules for aircrew
Cathay Pacific Airways will have hired back more than 180 local pilots by next month, with plans to bring on another “several hundred” over the coming year as resignations continue to sap the beleaguered carrier’s manpower.
In a statement to the Post on Thursday, a spokesman said Cathay had been rehiring local pilots since summer last year after cutting thousands of jobs since the coronavirus pandemic began.
“By February 2022, we would have offered employment to over 180 pilots … in the Hong Kong market,” he said.
The airline said the new hires would need to be retrained to operate specific aircraft – which would take time – and then be invited to sign up for closed-loop arrangements to support cargo and passenger flights.
In addition to hiring several hundred more pilots, Cathay will also be restarting its cadet programme early this year.
“We have already resumed our pilot recruitment activities, and this has generated significant interest within the Hong Kong pilot community and around the world,” the spokesman said.
Hong Kong’s strict quarantine requirements amid the Covid-19 pandemic have taken a toll on pilots personally, as well as on the aviation industry as a whole.
Pilots who spoke to the Post said there had been a “significant uptick” in resignations starting last November, when three cargo pilots were fired by Cathay after breaking company rules by leaving their hotel rooms while on a stopover in Frankfurt, Germany and then lying about it.
The airline declined to give specific figures on how many pilots had quit.
The company shed a record 5,900 jobs in October 2020 when it axed its regional airline Cathay Dragon. It went on to impose a range of permanent and temporary staffing cuts in the first half of 2021, further reducing its workforce by 2,500.
Now the airline is hiring back many of the local pilots left unemployed by the closure of Cathay Dragon.
Independent aviation analyst Brendan Sobie said that it would take time to hire and train the pilots, meaning the decision was not about the immediate term.
But he added that Cathay in the long term remained upbeat and “capacity will come back.”
The airline said its monthly cash burn would be between HK$1 billion (US$128.4 million) and HK$1.5 billion from February, compared with an average of HK$900 million in the first six months of 2021.
The Cathay spokesman said the city’s rules surrounding quarantine, among the strictest in the world, and the length of time they had been in force were placing a burden on aircrew.
“They have stood by us through what have been the toughest couple of years in our history, culminating in the extremely strict isolation and testing rules that have applied to them since the beginning of 2021,” he said.
