n recent years CSA has been intensively engaged in personnel development and employee training. Thanks to this fact, CSA has been successful in decreasing its number of employees while at the same time increasing labour productivity and improving professionalism.

This trend also continued in 1998, when CSA had 3 795 employees, which is 117 less than the previous year. The number of employees was also influenced by the transfer of aircraft and office space into a subsidiary company. Labour productivity showed a year-to-year increase. A detailed analysis of this may be found in the chapter "Economic Results".

A total of 498 new employees joined CSA, of these, 19 were flight-crew personnel and 86 cabin attendants. Most positions at CSA are filled through competitions. 645 employees, mostly from blue-collar professions, terminated their employment.

In 1998, similar to previous years, a collective agreement between the company's management and trade unions was concluded to ensure the lasting prosperity of CSA - which also meant improvements to the working and wage conditions of employees. The average monthly wage of a CSA employee reached 18 769 crowns in 1998.

In the course of 1998, a total of 10 058 people were trained in the CSA Training Centre, most of this number being company employees - with 401 participants coming from external sources.

The offer of Computer Based Training was extended by the "Low Visibility Operations Training" programme which is used for pilot-training for flight and landing under low visibility conditions, and by a "GPS Principles Training" programme, used to familiarise new pilots with the principles of navigation.

"Crew Resource Management" (CRM) courses for CSA crews were fully introduced in 1998. They are focused on the management of crew cooperation, i.e. the efficient and timely utilisation of all resources available to crews for safe and effective flight performance. Additionally, the joint training of entire crews (pilots, cabin attendants) was introduced to help effective crew-coordination during emergencies. The Boeing 737 simulator was used intensively in these courses.

Training crew to deal with problematic or dangerous passengers was also prepared and carried out at CSA. A comparable type of training has been done at a limited number of airlines, although the world trend is to place this type of communication training at a level as high as the training for standard emergency and rescue procedures. The application of this type of training increases the ability of crews to reduce the chances of such situations endangering flight safety.