Probably a lot of headaches over nothing. We may possibly take 120 of these planes over 10 years?! Really? Based on what I'm hearing, no way will they sell anywhere near that well. My guess is we'll take 3/year, if we're lucky.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great plane. But we barely operated half that many Gulfstreams in our heady days of massive growth. But somehow we're going to sell twice as many Globals as we ever had Gulfstreams without the same conditions we had pre-2008 (and which I doubt we'll ever see again)?
I realize we don't have that many FIRM orders, but I just don't think we're going to be operating a massive fleet of Globals.
As for who will fly them, my guess is it'll be Gulfstream pilots. Our contract is pretty open-ended about how displacements work. This EMT is very bottom-line oriented. And it makes the most financial sense to simply move displaced Gulfstream pilots into the Globals. Using that method, you only pay for one training event per pilot. If the Globals are opened up to straight seniority bidding company-wide, a lot of senior 'A' folks will go to the Globals. But you still have to do something with the Gulfstream pilots whose planes are going away. So now they'd be paying for the training for the Globals AND training the G pilots in something else. And if it's straight seniority bidding, the company will also have to replace the 'A' pilots who go to the Globals with other pilots, and it most likely would be with more 'A' pilots, since we have so many who are senior to the Gulfstream pilots. A straight seniority bid creates a whole bunch of expensive training events.
I am a pretty senior 'A' pilot. Only have a handful of G pilots senior to me. But I'm resigned to the fact that even if we take 6 Globals a year (very unlikely in my opinion) it's going to be a long time before I ever fly the Globals. With displacements, all the GIV pilots are ahead of me, plus a great deal of the super senior 'A' pilots who may want it (my seniority is in the mid-100's).
Oh well, that's just the way it goes. I would've enjoyed the longer trips. And higher pay scale. But I'll enjoy the CL300, or TEN, or 2000S or whatever super-mids we end up with.