Farquhar is obviously disappointed with the airlines' totally hands-off attitude: "I'd like to see more airlines consider employing newly graduated pilots in other roles during the downturn. In the long term it's an opportunity to transfer a greater appreciation of other team member roles into the flightdeck of the future, promoting a synergistic workplace through greater appreciation of each others roles.
Well he's got a talent for corporate yuckspeak, 'synergistic'
Airlines always did employ newly graduated pilots in other roles. But he seems to think pilots should be favoured in some way. But the reality is that airlines are not hiring anyone at the moment. That attitude harks back to the old days of flag carriers. People need to realise that airlines are businesses not employment schemes for dreamers like us.
This too is an example of that attitude.
He is politely echoing the more trenchantly expressed views of the training chief at Oxford Aviation Academy, Anthony Petteford, who is evangelistic about the need for airlines to recognise the fact that many of them are withdrawing totally from responsibility for the provision of skilled pilots in the future. As a result, he says, they are fishing in a pond that contains only those who are wealthy themselves or come from wealthy families, and he warns that this will not sustain a growing industry.
On the face of it, that seems a reasonable view until you remember that OAA are heavily into very expensive integrated courses. The only people who can afford them are wealthy. In fact it's a rather arrogant assumption that the only pilots worth considering come from the rather smaller 'integrated' pond.
Most pilots are not wealthy and use the much cheaper modular route to train, a pond he chooses to ignore. Read between the lines and Petteford is calling for more sponsorship, naturally his company would be the main beneficiary of that. It isn't going to happen. There is no need for it. There never will be a shortage of self sponsored pilots. There never has been and never will.
If Ryanair and Easyjet et al have only taught us one thing: It's that the airline business is just that; a business. No more, no less. The old style inefficent, unprofitable, overstaffed dinosaurs are either dying out or already extinct.
But in any case and I'm sure WWW will agree, none of this is new. It's only in recent years that this attitude prevailed:
A mere two years ago when I joined up, at the end of their courses CTC graduates were talking about which airline and base they'd like, not which employment centre they were going to next Monday."
The expectation of an immediate flying job, let alone an airline job is a relatively recent phenomenon. In previous years, you qualified then applied and waited and sometimes waited and waited. Some went the Instructor route. Others went back to their old jobs. Sometimes years passed until the airlines begain recruiting. It's just business as usual again.
There are few or no jobs for low time, inexperienced graduates again. The little bios in the article will be familiar to those of us of a certain age. Most have chosen to get on with it, albeit puzzled by apparent unfairness of it all. Only one of them seems to think that there should be some form of graduate scheme with government help. God bless his innocence.
Most will get their 'dream job' eventually at which point they discover that perhaps dreams and reality conflict a bit.
