All Asian crew
 

Flew to HK in J on Dec 28th and to my surprise there was all Asian cabin crew on this flight. Friendly yes but somewhat disorganised and forgetting stuff. Is this what we are going to expect in the future?

Increasingly so, yes.
I had what looked like all asian crew on HEL-SIN recently, Malay, Mandarin and English spoken.

And the service won't be on par with asian standards just because they hire locals. Too much in the company culture for that to change.

Also had an all Asian crew on SIN-HEL in early December. They were fine and pretty friendly so no complaints from me (aside from the almost 4 hour delay due to incredible headwinds resulting in the need for more fuel and offloading of 50 passengers).

Wow, really? The flight must have been operated by A330 which was previously never used on the SIN route due to its limited range?

All-Asian CC in J HEL-SIN just before Christmas, too. Service okay but I prefer to speak Finnish when flying with a Finnish airline.

What on earth is this headwind nonsense? The plane stands at SIN for several hours. Surely they will have time to fuel it before departure. And why throw off 50 pax? Can't they make a fuel stop en route? I'd rather be delayed because the flight would have to take a strange route and make a fuel stop at, say, DXB, than be delayed leaving 50 pax behind. AY does what costs them the least?

It has been the case since last April on HKG and SIN routes. I was on one of the first all-Asian cabin crew flights HEL-HKG-HEL and the cabin crew were extremely friendly providing quite good service. Some flaws, though, but generally I had nothing to complaint whatsoever.

This change was a part of the vist saving agreement with the union last (?) year. No futher outsourcing has been planned and AY is recruiting more Finnish cabin crew. These flights leaving Helsinki at midnight required the Finnish crew to stay two nights at the destination which was consirered to be too expensive. I wonder what happens if Finnair ever starts flights to Manila, Kuala Lumpur or Ho Chi Minh city (more than a weekly semi-charter).

Do not forget to claim EUR 600, if you arrived more than 3 hours late at your destination.
Headwinds in the wintertime are no extraordinary circumstance. Operating SIN-HEL with a A330-300 just is a recipe for what happened to you.

The deal is to reduce crew costs, so if they have reduced frequencies, the staff will move to SIN or HKG to do the other AY flights. The days of long layovers at the beach because of limited frequency are long gone. Even the charter companies don't pay good hotels anymore and expect FAs to share rooms.

Being pretty is enough for many. :D

True. Flew HEL-SGN last week, and tomorrow back. A purser on the flight told me the whole (Finnish) crew fly to BKK from SGN and then work again on BKK-HEL flight. The crew who fly on SGN-HEL comes from BKK.

Yes, it was an A330 but hopefully SIN will be replaced with the A350 at some point. I'm glad there were full flat beds in any case.

Perfectly understandable and a very valid point around language. Qantas do have crew from quite a few countries including Asia but there are always Australian crew on the flight.

The headwinds were up to 195 km/h for the part of the flight I was awake, but managed to get a photo of the IFE showing 170 km/h below.

I'm not sure why it took them that long to find out about the weather ahead and adapt, but even after the additional fuel and IDB there was talk of a potential fuel stop in Moscow en route.

Thankfully that didn't eventuate and we flew direct to HEL.

My final destination was OSL, and as I had built in quite a long layover in HEL managed to make my original HEL-OSL flight. Assume that means I am not eligible for the EUR 600?

^

Those are normal headwinds at this time of year, in bad conditions.

I don't understand for a bit why they IDB:d people a delayed the flight instead of scheduling an extra stop on the way - unless they have extortionate fees on those from the airports. Moscow would seem an obvious one, or DXB considering alliances.


That is correct, you have no entitlement by EU regulation 2004/261 if you were not delayed to your final destination.

Extra stop on SIN-HEL would probably mean crew duty hours going over the limits and this would require a new crew for the last part of the flight. Alternatively it would be a disastrously long wait before the same crew could operate the remainder of the flight.

I guess IDB was the least bad option given the scenario. Hopefully AY realise the problem and stops using the A333 moped on SIN route.

I seriously doubt that crew costs more than €600x50 (or whatever the passengers not amking their flight were entitled to. At 75% of paid cash fare I doubt the average is much lower) to fly in. The EU compensation for the passengers on the plane would be payable anyway [flight about 4hrs delayed], either at 300 or 600 eur per pax for (basically) any pax misconnecting or having HEL as final destination...