Home-Based 737 MAX Employer: Flying for Corendon Dutch Airlines

Corendon Dutch Airlines (IATA CD, ICAO CND, callsign "Dutch Corendon") is the Netherlands-registered leisure carrier of the Corendon Tourism Group. It was founded in 2010, received Dutch AOC number NL-AOC-68, and began commercial operations in April 2011 with a single Boeing 737-800 flying holiday routes from Amsterdam. Its registered office is in Badhoevedorp, in the municipality of Haarlemmermeer, a short drive from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

The most important thing an applicant needs to understand about Corendon is that it is not one airline. It is three separate airlines under one brand, each with its own AOC, its own employment law, and radically different pilot conditions:

• Corendon Dutch Airlines (CD / CND), the Dutch operator, based at Schiphol, employing pilots on Dutch contracts.
• Corendon Airlines (XC / CAI), the original Turkish operator founded in 2004 and based in Antalya, employing pilots on Turkish contracts.
• Corendon Airlines Europe (XR / CXI), the Maltese operator founded in 2017, which staffs German, Belgian, Greek, Egyptian and Turkish bases on Maltese contracts.

Pilot job boards and salary aggregators routinely blend these three entities into a single "Corendon" listing. They should not be blended. A German-based Maltese contract with hotel accommodation and a 20-days-on commuting roster is a fundamentally different proposition from a Dutch contract at Schiphol with a pension scheme, 25 statutory-plus holiday days, and a requirement to live within an hour of the airport. This article covers the Dutch operator only, and flags clearly wherever a figure comes from a sister AOC.

Corendon Dutch Airlines is small by design. It operates three Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, all delivered new between September 2023 and April 2024, and it charters a wet-leased Airbus A350-900 from Spanish operator World2Fly for its Caribbean services. It is the only Dutch airline that offers holiday flights from all five Dutch commercial airports, and the only Dutch carrier serving both Groningen Eelde and Maastricht Aachen in the summer season, according to reporting by Luchtvaartnieuws. The group as a whole carries in the region of ten million passengers a year across roughly 33 to 35 aircraft, and Corendon's own corporate responsibility report put group turnover at approximately €800 million for 2024.

Ownership sits with the Corendon Tourism Group, founded by Turkish-Dutch entrepreneur Atilay Uslu. Gunay Uslu was appointed group CEO in early 2024. The airline is not part of an alliance, does not codeshare in the traditional sense, and sells almost entirely through the Corendon tour operator and its own direct channels.

Corendon Dutch Airlines operates one of the youngest and simplest fleets of any European airline: three Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, all leased new from Air Lease Corporation, all configured in a single-class 213-seat layout. There is no mixed fleet, no sub-fleet, and no second type on the Dutch AOC. From a pilot's perspective that means one type rating, one set of procedures, one recurrent training profile, and no fleet bidding of any kind.

The transition away from the Boeing 737-800 was completed quickly. PH-CDH left the fleet in October 2023, PH-CDF in December 2023, and PH-CDE, the aircraft that flew the airline's first revenue service in April 2011, in April 2024. The replacement MAX 9s arrived in the reverse order: PH-CDP was ferried non-stop from Boeing Field to Schiphol at the end of September 2023 and entered service the following weekend on a flight to the Greek island of Lefkas, PH-CDQ followed in November 2023, and PH-CDR was delivered in late April 2024 and entered service on 1 May 2024 on a rotation to Corfu. Corendon Dutch Airlines was the first operator in the Corendon group to take the MAX, and the PH-CDP was the first 737 MAX 9 to appear on the Dutch civil register.

Fleet data compiled from Corendon corporate sources, ch-aviation, Luchtvaartnieuws and Dutch registry records, current to mid-2026. Aircraft counts on the Dutch AOC have been stable at three since May 2024.

What the wet-lease means for your logbook

This is the single most misunderstood point about Corendon Dutch Airlines. The airline sells and markets long-haul flights to Curaçao and Bonaire under its own CD flight numbers, five times a week to Curaçao and with a Bonaire routing on selected days. Prospective pilots reasonably assume this creates a widebody career path. It does not. The A350-900 is a wet-lease, meaning World2Fly supplies the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance. Corendon Dutch Airlines pilots do not fly it, do not hold an A350 rating, and are not in line for one. The same applies to the A330 announced for the Düsseldorf to Curaçao route from December 2026.

The one exception on record is charter work. In June 2026 Corendon positioned a 737 MAX 9 to Curaçao with its own cockpit and cabin crews, routing via Terceira in the Azores for fuel, to operate a charter programme between Curaçao and United States World Cup host cities including Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Kansas City and Philadelphia. That was a one-off special operation rather than a scheduled pattern, but it does illustrate that the MAX 9 and its Dutch crews occasionally operate well outside the Mediterranean.

Corendon Dutch Airlines does not publish a pilot pay scale. There is no collective labour agreement (CAO) covering its pilots, which means there is no publicly registered salary table of the kind that exists for KLM, Transavia, TUI fly Netherlands and easyJet Netherlands. The company's own First Officer vacancy describes the offer only as "een marktconform salaris", a market-conforming salary. That is the honest starting point, and any article claiming precise Corendon Dutch pay steps is extrapolating.

What can be established is threefold: what Corendon itself publishes, what third-party aggregators report for the Corendon group, and what the surrounding Dutch market pays. Taken together these give a usable range, and the Dutch benchmarks are the more reliable guide because a Schiphol-based Dutch operator competing for Dutch-speaking, type-rated 737 pilots has to price against Transavia and TUI fly or it will not fill seats.

What Corendon publishes directly

Third-party reported ranges (Corendon group, treat with caution)

These are the only publicly circulating numbers attached to the Corendon Dutch Airlines name. They come from a third-party jobs wiki, not from the company, and the base list attached to them shows they describe the group rather than the Dutch entity.

The Dutch market benchmarks that actually matter

A more defensible way to size a Corendon Dutch offer is to look at what its direct Dutch competitors publish, because these are CAO-registered figures rather than estimates.

Transavia figures from Transavia's own recruitment materials; TUI fly Netherlands figures from the registered pilot CAO for 2024 to 2026. All are gross monthly amounts before Dutch income tax and social contributions.

The December 2024 pay settlement

One concrete and well-documented compensation event does exist. Dutch union AVV spent around eighteen months trying to open collective bargaining with Corendon Dutch Airlines and was preparing to ask a court to compel the company to negotiate. In December 2024 Corendon short-circuited that process by putting a high wage offer directly to its pilots, conditional on those pilots agreeing to discuss terms directly with the company for the following two years without AVV involvement. A majority of Corendon pilots accepted, and the union and the company jointly withdrew the court case. AVV's own published account describes the offer as "een hoog loonbod", a high wage offer.

The practical read for a candidate is that Corendon Dutch pay was repriced upward at the end of 2024 under competitive and union pressure, and that the resulting terms are individually negotiated rather than published. That two-year direct-negotiation window ran to around the end of 2026, so the next round of terms is a live question for anyone joining now.

Corendon Dutch Airlines does not publish its roster construction rules, and with no CAO there is no negotiated work and rest agreement (Werk- en Rusttijdenregeling) of the type VNV has secured at KLM, Transavia and TUI fly. What governs the roster is therefore the regulatory floor plus company practice: EASA Subpart FTL under Regulation (EU) 965/2012, the Dutch Arbeidstijdenbesluit vervoer, and EU Directive 2000/79/EC on mobile aviation workers.

The regulatory ceilings you are actually flying to

What the operation looks like day to day

The Dutch operation is overwhelmingly out-and-back short and medium-haul from Schiphol, with additional departures from Rotterdam The Hague, Eindhoven, Groningen Eelde and Maastricht Aachen. Summer flying is the Mediterranean core: Turkey, Greece, Spain including the Balearics and Canaries, Bulgaria, Portugal and Italy. The airline announced an expanded summer 2026 programme adding Costa Blanca, Costa Brava via Barcelona and Girona, Menorca, La Palma and Málaga, plus Agadir, Marrakech, Cairo and the Algarve.

Unlike some leisure carriers, Corendon Dutch Airlines does not shut down in winter. Its winter programme from Schiphol includes Hurghada in Egypt at around five hours, Banjul in The Gambia at around six hours fifteen minutes, the Canary Islands at around four and a half hours, and from winter 2025/2026 a new three-times-weekly service to Sal in Cape Verde. Those are long sectors for a 737, and they materially change the shape of a duty day compared to a two-sector Antalya rotation. Corendon does not publish which of these routes involve crew night stops, but the company does confirm that per diems are paid for overnights away from base, which indicates night stops occur on at least part of the network.

Illustration of the pattern described in Corendon Airlines Europe's own cockpit recruitment FAQ: 20 days on at the base, then 10 consecutive block-off days, with "snipped" rest days interspersed during the on-base block. Applies to the Maltese AOC, not to Corendon Dutch Airlines.

Why the Dutch and Maltese models are not comparable

The Corendon Airlines Europe cockpit FAQ sets out the Maltese model plainly. Crew are expected to average 75 block hours per month against a 100-hour 28-day ceiling, with a peak in high season. Accommodation at base is provided in an aparthotel with airport shuttles, or a housing allowance is paid if the pilot rents privately. The roster is 20 days on at base followed by 10 consecutive block-off days, and critically those block-off days are set off against the annual leave entitlement. Flights home during block-off days are paid for by the crew member. Contracts are fixed-term with an annual evaluation each October determining renewal.

None of that describes the Dutch operation. Corendon Dutch Airlines pilots live at home in the Netherlands and commute daily to Schiphol. The company's First Officer vacancy states that applicants must hold a category B driving licence and must be able to reach Schiphol within one hour, which tells you two things: the operation uses home standby with a short callout, and it effectively requires living in or around the Randstad. Annual leave is stated separately as 25 days full-time and is not consumed by a block-off cycle. A commuting allowance is paid rather than accommodation being provided.

The benefits package at Corendon Dutch Airlines is a conventional Dutch employer package rather than a specialised airline-pilot package. That distinction matters. Dutch employment law provides a strong baseline that applies automatically: statutory holiday accrual, the standard 8 percent holiday allowance convention, mandatory participation in the national health insurance system, sickness pay obligations on the employer, and full access to Dutch social security. On top of that Corendon adds a company pension scheme and a set of travel-sector perks. What it does not add, because there is no CAO, is the specialised layer that VNV has negotiated at KLM, Transavia and TUI fly: a dedicated pilot pension fund, a collectively-funded loss of licence scheme, and career-protection provisions.

Staff travel: a different model to a network carrier

Do not expect a legacy-style ID90 network. Corendon is not in an alliance and has no interline staff-travel agreements of the kind KLM pilots enjoy across SkyTeam. What Corendon offers instead is a tour-operator benefit: discounted package holidays and hotel nights on the Corendon product, extended beyond the employee to family and friends. For a pilot whose family takes Mediterranean or Caribbean package holidays, that can be worth more in cash terms than a standby ticket scheme. For a pilot who wants to fly standby to Tokyo, it is worth nothing. The group's Turkish and Maltese entities separately offer standby staff tickets on Corendon flights for crew and first-degree family members.

Pension and loss of licence: the two gaps to interrogate

Corendon confirms a pension scheme exists but publishes no detail. There is no Dutch industry-wide pension fund for airline pilots that would automatically cover Corendon; the well-known dedicated pilot fund, Stichting Pensioenfonds Vliegend Personeel KLM, is specific to KLM. Corendon's arrangement is therefore almost certainly an insured company scheme, and the terms that matter, namely the contribution percentage, the employer share, whether it is defined contribution, and the retirement age assumption, are all things a candidate must ask about directly.

Loss of licence is the more serious gap. Pilots at CAO-covered Dutch airlines benefit from collectively-arranged schemes: at KLM, for example, cover runs through the Stichting Loss of License Fonds under the collective agreement rather than through a commercial insurance policy. No equivalent collective scheme is documented for Corendon Dutch Airlines. Dutch statutory sickness and disability provisions (loondoorbetaling bij ziekte and the WIA regime) apply to any employee, but they are not designed around the specific risk of permanently losing a Class 1 medical while retaining full general working capacity. Commercial loss of licence products are available in the Netherlands through specialist providers, and any pilot joining a non-CAO Dutch operator should establish in writing what the employer provides before deciding whether to buy private cover.

This is where Corendon Dutch Airlines is weakest, and candidates should go in with clear eyes. Three aircraft, one type, no orders, and a parent group that has publicly said it does not need more aircraft is not a growth environment. Corendon does not publish a seniority list, does not publish a pilot headcount, and does not publish upgrade timelines. What can be assessed is the structural arithmetic, and the arithmetic is unforgiving.

The establishment problem

A three-aircraft narrowbody operation flying a year-round schedule needs a modest number of crews. Corendon has not published how many pilots that translates to, and we are not going to estimate a headcount and present it as fact. What is not in doubt is the direction of travel: the fleet has been stable at three aircraft since May 2024, there are no orders, and Aviation Week reported in May 2026 that Corendon Airlines sees no need to expand its fleet in the current environment. In a stable-fleet airline, left-seat vacancies arise only when an incumbent captain retires, resigns, moves to management or loses a medical. There is no fleet-growth engine creating new commands.

The corollary is that Corendon Dutch Airlines does hire direct-entry captains. A published B737NG Captain vacancy for Corendon Dutch Airlines (since filled) specified an EASA ATPL, EASA Class 1 medical, 5,000 hours total time, 1,000 command hours, current PBN, ICAO English Level 4 or higher, an unrestricted right to live and work in the EU, and both English and Dutch. Direct-entry command is good news if you are already a captain and want to come home to the Netherlands. It is bad news if you are a First Officer waiting for an upgrade, because every direct-entry captain hired is a command that does not go to an internal candidate.

Movement between the three Corendon AOCs

There is no published single seniority list across Corendon Dutch Airlines, Corendon Airlines and Corendon Airlines Europe, and no published transfer or bidding mechanism between them. This is the opposite of a group like Air France and Transavia France, where a single seniority list protects a pilot assigned to the low-cost subsidiary. At Corendon, the three carriers are separate employers under separate jurisdictions: Dutch, Maltese and Turkish. Moving from the Maltese entity to the Dutch entity, or the reverse, should be assumed to be a new job application on new terms rather than an internal transfer, unless the company states otherwise in writing.

This matters more than usual right now because the group's growth is concentrated in Germany, flown by the Maltese AOC. Corendon is stationing ten aircraft across Düsseldorf, Hanover, Cologne/Bonn and Nuremberg for summer 2026, with Düsseldorf becoming its largest departure airport. A pilot who joins Corendon hoping to ride group expansion into a command needs to understand that the expansion is happening on a Maltese contract at a German base, not at Schiphol.

Corendon Dutch Airlines recruits through its own Dutch careers portal at werkenbijcorendon.nl, separately from the group's international portal at corendonairlines.com. This is an important practical point: the group careers page carries First Officer and Trainee First Officer campaigns for the Turkish and Maltese entities with German, Belgian, Greek and Turkish bases, while Dutch cockpit vacancies appear on the Dutch site. Applying through the wrong portal means applying to the wrong airline.

Cockpit hiring at Corendon is also seasonal in rhythm. The group has stated that, as a leisure airline whose operation peaks in summer, its main recruitment drive typically starts in September or October, with most cockpit and cabin positions closed by the time the summer season begins.

Experienced First Officer requirements (Corendon Dutch Airlines)

Direct-entry Captain requirements (Corendon Dutch Airlines)

Captain requirements from a published Corendon Dutch Airlines B737NG Captain vacancy, since filled. Requirements on future campaigns may differ.

Selection stages

In October 2025 Corendon Dutch Airlines announced a cadet pilot programme with E-Flight Academy, a flight school founded in 2021 and based at Teuge Airport near Apeldoorn. The first cohort started in January 2026. The programme is genuinely unusual and deserves its own section, because it is marketed as the world's first airline cadet pathway in which a substantial share of the flying training is done in electric aircraft, and because it is the only route into a Corendon-funded type rating on the Dutch AOC.

How the programme works

The course is a modular route to a frozen ATPL, run to a 16-month schedule, with students trained to Corendon's own procedures from the first day so that they can move directly into the airline's operation on completion. The main training base is Teuge Airport, with night flying and instrument approaches flown at Lelystad, and additional hours flown in Alicante in Spain during the winter months for better weather. A significant portion of early flying is done on the Pipistrel Velis, the certified electric two-seat trainer, which is what produces the claimed emissions reduction of roughly half compared with a conventional programme.

Details as published by E-Flight Academy on its Corendon programme page. Full admission requirements are held in Corendon's own cadet vacancy rather than on the school's site.

The commitment question

Candidates who pass selection sign an intentieovereenkomst, a letter of intent, with Corendon. E-Flight Academy is careful and commendably direct about what this is worth: the school states that the chance of being hired after training is "very high" but that this is explicitly not a guarantee, and refers candidates to Corendon for the conditions. Corendon's own announcement describes graduates as being able to start at the airline directly, which is a statement of design intent rather than a contractual commitment.

That is a €119,000 personal investment plus living costs, against a letter of intent rather than a conditional job offer, at an airline with three aircraft. It is a materially different risk profile from a KLM Flight Academy place or an Air France cadetship, where the airline funds the training. It is, however, a better proposition than the group's Maltese Trainee First Officer scheme, where the cadet self-funds both the flight training and a B737 type rating delivered by Global Aviation Training in Madrid, and where the resulting contract is fixed-term.

The realistic alternatives for a Dutch-speaking, 737-rated pilot who wants to be based in the Netherlands are Transavia Netherlands and TUI fly Netherlands. Both are leisure operators, both are Schiphol-centred, and both compete directly with Corendon for the same candidates. The comparison below scores all three on the same six dimensions used in the scorecard. Scores are editorial estimates based on the published CAOs, company recruitment material and the research set out in this article.

Transavia fleet data from Transavia's own newsroom. CAO figures from the registered Dutch collective agreements. Corendon rows reflect the absence of published data rather than an assessment that the terms are poor.

Key takeaways from the comparison

Transavia is the benchmark, and it is a high one. A CAO negotiated with VNV, a 52-aircraft fleet across two types, four bases, published salary scales, an 8.33 percent year-end bonus, 8 percent holiday allowance, profit sharing and an estimated seven to eight year path to command. Transavia also does not require Dutch. On paper it beats Corendon on every measure except one, and it is the airline any Corendon candidate should apply to in parallel.

TUI fly Netherlands offers something neither of the others can: a widebody. Its pilot CAO for 2024 to 2026 gives published maxima of €7,771 for a Senior First Officer and €11,561 for a Captain, and the group has been advertising Boeing 787 First Officer roles based in Amsterdam alongside 737 positions. For a pilot who wants long-haul without leaving the Netherlands and without joining KLM, TUI fly is the realistic option.

Where Corendon genuinely wins is aircraft and accessibility. The three MAX 9s are the newest narrowbodies flown by any Dutch operator, delivered between September 2023 and April 2024, in a clean single-type operation with no sub-fleets. And the entry bar is meaningfully lower: 300 hours of recent multi-engine time with a 737 rating and a line check, against Transavia's requirement of 500 hours on type or 1,000 hours total with 500 on a CS-25 multi-pilot type. For a low-hours Dutch-speaking pilot who already has a 737 rating, Corendon is often a realistic first airline where Transavia is not.

Where Corendon loses is structure. No CAO means no published pay scale, no negotiated work and rest agreement, no collective loss of licence scheme, and no seniority-based bidding. Three aircraft with no orders means commands are scarce and direct-entry captains compete with internal upgrades. That is not a criticism of Corendon's intentions; it is arithmetic.

The industrial relations picture at Corendon Dutch Airlines is the most distinctive thing about the airline as an employer, and it is the part most prospective pilots know nothing about. In short: Corendon Dutch Airlines pilots have no collective labour agreement, and in December 2024 a majority of them voted to keep it that way for two years in exchange for a pay rise.

The Dutch union landscape

The dominant pilot union in the Netherlands is the Vereniging Nederlandse Verkeersvliegers (VNV), the Dutch member association of IFALPA and the European Cockpit Association. VNV has close to 6,000 members and negotiates collective agreements for around 4,500 of them. Those agreements cover pilots at the KLM group including KLM, Transavia and the KLM Flight Academy, plus TUI fly, easyJet and CHC helicopters. The union's board carries dedicated seats for KLM, Transavia, TUI fly and easyJet. Since its first KLM agreement in 1969 it has embedded structures that Dutch pilots take for granted: the Regeling Vlieger Loopbaan career regulation, pension arrangements, the Werk- en Rusttijdenregeling work and rest agreement, legal assistance in professional cases, and protection in disciplinary proceedings.

Corendon does not appear on that list. No VNV collective agreement covers Corendon Dutch Airlines pilots, and none of the structural protections listed above applies to them.

The AVV campaign and how it ended

AVV, a smaller Dutch union that runs on a democratic members-vote model, opened a Corendon Dutch Airlines B.V. sector in April 2024 with a first member meeting, and spent around eighteen months with its workplace representatives preparing to reach collective bargaining. Corendon, by AVV's account, did not want to participate. By November 2024 the union announced it was heading to court, intending to have a judge rule on whether Corendon was obliged to sit down with AVV and attempt to reach a CAO.

That process collapsed in early December 2024. Corendon put a high wage offer directly to its pilots, conditional on the pilots agreeing to discuss terms and conditions directly with the company for the following two years, without AVV involved. The majority of Corendon pilots accepted. AVV and Corendon then jointly withdrew the lawsuit. AVV's published statement is measured: it wishes the pilots success, says it is standing on the sidelines for now, and remains ready to help. From 1 September 2025 the sector moved to AVV's standard membership contribution, indicating the sector remains formally open.

What this means if you are considering joining

There are two honest readings, and a candidate should weigh both.

The favourable reading is that the December 2024 outcome delivered a real pay rise, that a majority of the pilot body actively chose direct negotiation over union representation, and that a small airline with short communication lines can move faster and more flexibly for individuals than a rigid collective scale allows. Corendon's own careers material emphasises an informal culture with short lines to management, and a three-aircraft operation genuinely is a place where the Chief Pilot knows every pilot by name.

The cautious reading is that direct negotiation without a union works well when the labour market is tight and much less well when it is not. A pay rise won under the threat of litigation in a pilot shortage is not the same thing as a durable structure. Without a CAO there is no negotiated work and rest agreement above the legal minimum, no collective loss of licence fund, no seniority-protection framework, no agreed redundancy provisions, and no mechanism forcing the employer back to the table. Everything rests on individual contracts and on the employer's continued goodwill. The two-year direct-negotiation commitment made in December 2024 has now run its course, which makes the current bargaining position at the airline a live and legitimate question to raise in an interview.

Because Corendon Dutch Airlines publishes very little about pilot terms, verifying information at source matters more here than at a CAO-covered airline. These are the primary references used in this article and the places to check before applying or accepting an offer.