Online Application System Failure

[Hansard]

You've spent hours completing an online application form, you press the submit button and if you're lucky, an e-mail appears confirming that it has been sent/received.

If you're not so lucky, you press the submit button, the system crashes and all your hard work disappears into cyberspace.

What do you do?

Do you phone the airline (assuming you can find a contact number and at the risk of annoying them) and ask if their whizzo new system has processed you application?

Do you start again and risk wasting more time?

Do you give up and decide you didn't want to be a pilot after all?

I'm fed up wasting my time after the second loss this week. The airlines must have massive databases full of rubbish from unsuccessful attempts. A pile of CVs would surely be better than this faceless method?

And while I'm in rant mode, how do you retain a copy of the application screens if no "save" or "print" options appear?

[Reds Blues Greens]

Hi,

It's an interesting subject and I we have banded the discussion around amongst friends before.

I have found that with online applications you can highlight the page and then Right Click, Copy. Paste this into a new Word document. This will place the page, more or less, as it appears, into Word. For example, with the BACX application, you can move through the rest of the application using 'Go to next step' and repeat the process, until you have the entire thing in Word.

You can now browse the application and various questions at your leisure. You can even type your answers into Word, in the relevant boxes, and make yourself a little mock-up application form.

Word of warning: This seems to make Word extremely slow to load and save. Don't worry, I think that this is normal (maybe something to do with pasting an webpage into it).

Good luck,

Ian.