Interviews, jobs & sponsorshipDo ya feel lucky, Punk? Well do ya? If so, here's the place to swap the hot gen on who's sponsoring or employing, their selection criteria, and where those oh so elusive first jobs can be spotted in the wild. Watch out for the tumbleweeds...
I'm just a wannabe so take with pinch of salt but I think that we must be careful that a 'positive' attitude isn't just a synonym for head in the sand. MYT and 100 pilots, no big deal at there does appear to be a shortage of experienced pilots. However, it also seems to be slowly dawning on some people that the hiring reality this year has not met the expectations, in other words a sign that excess capacity in the industry is reducing.
On the opposite side, I guess that spring and summer are probably the worst times of the year for recruitment and I imagine things will pick up in earnest again September time.
On the adjacent side, it has also been apparent for the last 9 months that an SSTR goes a long long way to getting that first job. That is one expense too far for me really so I'm still looking up rather than down.
Well I've let this thread run a while now without interference as an interesting experiment. It has been an illuminating and informative thread, hasn't degenerated into a flame war and it is a credit to all who have contributed. Special thanks to LukeSkyToddler.
I am making this thread a sticky in the hope that many Wannabes will read it early in their career planning.
My two cents is this. Airline hiring and the wider flying jobs market is fantastic at the moment. My company, easyJet, hired 450 pilots in the last 12 months alone and similar numbers are in the pipeline for next year and the year after. In 1998 when I became the first PPRuNe Wannabe I doubt there were 450 new jobs in the entire UK airline industry. Today school are crying out for instructors, regional airlines are desperate to keep hold of pilots, low cost airlines need hundreds of new pilots every year and the flag carriers have all hired in the last 12 months and will do so again soon. IT DOESN'T GET MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. Which means it will sometime in the future get worse. Probably a lot worse. So dry your eyes Princess - you've never had it so good.
"Flying instruction, 6 grand outlay to get a job that will pay u what, 10 k a year?"...
Possibly true, but it also gets you:
Currency
Contacts
Great experience of flying in all sorts of conditions
Great experience of working with the public
Hours in the logbook
Potentially some great friends
Some great fun flying
Valuable experience that some employers seem to like
Why not get all the above by doing some instructing part-time, having another job that pays the bills.
(By the way, if you're being charged 6 grand for an FI rating, you're being ripped off.)
imagine, australia, 1989-1990, thousands of experienced, qualified and motivated pilots driving taxis. try and get a job with that talent pool walking the streets.
give up whenever you like, but the guys who did are still driving taxis.
Vito Corleone, you indignantly reply "Pilot Mike, you do not know me, you do not know who I am. How dare you say that I am not fit to fly for an airline."
Three reasons sprang to mind:
1 In your very own words, you hate " ...going down this road to nowhere ... this stinking industry... this rancid industry... this rediculous world of aviation ... The airline industry is a complete reflection of Brittish capitalist society... life ruined by his quest to fly for a living... to fly planes for a living it makes my blood boil... I couldn't give a toss if I never flew a plane again... never go near a plane again... "
2 You completely ignored Luke SkyToddler's excellent advice to "SHUT UP WITH THE WHINGING, GET POSITIVE AND GO INSTRUCTING", coupled to my advice that the least attractive applicant to any airline is a non-Type Rated newbie with zero experience who moans and whinges a lot.
3 You have vented your bitterness and dissed the industry publicly on this forum. This certainly isn't the number 1 quality most airline employers would put top of their list of requirements. As plenty of people here are telling you, your attitude is all wrong for becoming a pilot.
Stop kidding yourself that you are "working my way up this stinking industry". You are outside the industry, looking enviously in. And with your pitiful attitude, it will forever remain that way.
Attitude and experience count for a whole lot more than how much money you've spent. A zero time school leaver with the right attitude stands a better chance than you with your attitude at present, despite you having spent £40k on your ratings already.
You would do well to re-read the entire thread, picking up on any advice which was offered to you - all for free. Without a substantial change of attitude, I stand firmly by my prediction that your airline ambitions are dead in the water. Very soon, you might not just be eating those value beans - you could very well find yourself stacking them!
Last edited by pilotmike : 28th July 2007 at 17:23.
The phrase "you make your own luck" is never truer than in aviation!
You, and others in your position, have been given some excellent advice in this thread. You MUST be the one to be pro-active. You talk as if you went to be an instructor, it would be something you would be "settling" for. Again, your pre-training planning/expectations seem to be way wide of the mark. I'll say it again, but having a frozen ATPL is a very small part of the jigsaw. Like in other industries, you must have other strings to your bow, because it is certain the competition will have.
One thing is for definate, if you sit and wait for it to come to you it will not. That is as predictable as day turning to night. As WWW says, things haven't been as good as this for a long long time. Take advantage of it while you can. If you're still asking yourself "how?" after this thread, then you've no chance.
Quote "Airline hiring and the wider flying jobs market is fantastic at the moment. My company, easyJet, hired 450 pilots in the last 12 months alone"
And only 1 from OAT according to there site, i like that stat, hope for us modular boys yet.
Saying that, probably the only low hour guy they took!
450 pilots - mix of DEP and Cadets and SSTR.
In the past I have seen around 20 Oxford cadets but that was because they got put forward to GECAT (then easy)..Type rating self funded.
I'm sure if someone went from Oxford to the ctc atp scheme and then onto Easjet, Oxford would be right on the money and put it under employment stats
What a great thread ! Some books keep you hooked, and this thread has kept me hooked for the last 30 minutes or so.
For some strange reason it's cheered me up. I think it's knowing that there are quite a few people out there in the same boat as me ! I've only been looking for work for about 8 months, but I've managed to wangle an ops job at a bizjet outfit and I did an FI rating recently. I'm hoping to do some part-time instructing to stay current, whilst the ops job (almost) pays the bills and debts. If the ops job leads nowhere then I'll look to do some full-time instructing. Think I'll need a book on creative accounting to make the sums add up though !
Not sure what to make of Mr. Corleone. You do seem to have a certain doggedness about you, which you can hopefully put to good use. I hope your bitterness and anger is just a phase you're going through. The industry can be very fickle and does make you want to scream and shout obscenities sometimes, but hey that's life I'm afraid. I think there are some other industries out there which are just as fickle to break into.
My advice would be scream and shout for a few hours or days, then get back on the trail. Whatever you do, try to lose the bitterness, or cover it up b****y well if you get an interview !
Thanks for all the advice and drama on this thread. It's been emotional.
It strikes me there are 3 routes to get a job in this rancid industry:
in order of preference.
1. Have a training captain as a father. I have seen many un-deserving incompetent jokers get jobs this way.
2. Buy your way to a job, either buy a) paying a huge premium to go to an integrated school who for some reason the Airlines like to recruit from direct, overlooking countless numbers of worthy modular students.
or b) paying 20 odd k for a type rating and hoping for the best.
3. Working your way up from the bottom, through instructing to air taxi to charter work to turbo prop to jets.
Why are you flying? Because you love being in the air and all it entails, the freedom, the fun, the absolute love?
Or because you want to sit in a bar with gold bars on your shoulders and tell all the girls you're an Airline Pilot?
Maybe it does not help much what I´m going to say , but if you have completed your training in UK under UK standards ,you have THE BEST licence you can get in the world and everyone knows that , although not much experience ...., I´m sure time is going to change very very soon and you´ll be call for an interview ,hopefully in UK.
I´m spanish and have spent aprox 120.000 Euros in training ,ATR TR and believe it or not i have NO JOB , but my time I know will come very soon , or by the way I´m 36 yo and 528 h tt, keep tyrying and I hope you´ll be lucky.
what you have seen ,people getting jobs because of conections if the same all over the world .
I wish you all the best .
paul
All I got for my £xxxx was some crappy green folder with some dodgy bits of paper in it.
(Still, it least it hasn't got sheep tracks on it........yet )
Back on to thread:
Vito,
Sorry but you come across to me as a spoilt little school brat who has spent his money and now demands that some company with big shiny aeroplanes gives you one to play with.
You are at the bottom of the pile. It will get there eventually but will whisk by you with an attitude like that. This game is about skill, experience and luck and it is a torrid mix of the three. Timing is also thrown in there. If you didn't realise this when you started then you were either very naive or badly briefed.
The biggest problem that interviewer have with low houred pilots is getting them to open up properly in the interview to enable the interviewer to assess the candiate. It is difficult and it is a nerve wracking environment but all that pulls you along in that scenario is your personality, drive and determination. You don't have thousands of hours to draw experiences from to let the interviewer know how you handled this situation and that so give him, and yourself a break and lighten up.
Time will tell but, from the way you post here, I feel you are in the wrong line of work and have made a very expensive mistake. Please don't come and sit in my cockpit, I am allowed to moan about the state of the world, but then I've been flying in it for many years and I need the younger guys to point out that it really isn't that bad!
Cheers
Last edited by wobble2plank : 1st August 2007 at 10:26.
Although I agree with much of what you have to say about the industry, I cannot really find quite as much sympathy with regard to your own predicament.
The woe-is-me/sackloth-and-ashes fatalism you have exhibited would make even the arch-pessimist Schopenhauer look like a starry-eyed optimist and will naturally draw ridicule in a forum populated by aspiring and accomplished professional aviators, many of whom justifiably value any ability they have to cope with adversity as being their most important qualification.
Do yourself a favour and take on board the advice of LukeSkyToddler and pilotmike if you really want to be an airline pilot - although I suspect that your post may be evidence of an ongoing Damascine convertion to the shocking realisation that not everyone in the RHS of an airliner is necessarily the best person to be there, and that you are therefore perhaps not competing on an entirely level playing field. There are many others within the industry, not least occupying the LHS who might have reason to agree with this. However, contrast your own bitter complaints with the measured words of VFE:-
Quote:
As I see it, the only thing going for the airline gig these days is the dosh and depending on your employer that is now an area of contention too. Do you really consider yourself 'employed' as an airline pilot when you pay for your TR, uniform and food? Personally, I'd feel a sense of personal disappointment if I found myself down that route. Seems to me that it's more a case of buying yer way into a dream, something which (through experience) I am no longer willing to do. However, each to their own of course.....
...not one iota of self-pity here: in fact quite the opposite.
That said, we all have our weaker moments, and a cry for help is a natural human response when all else has failed, as the grim evidence of cockpit voice recorders often attest, but usually only in the final few seconds after all else has indeed failed - as opposed to just after things start going wrong and accompanied by impotent rage directed towards alleged failings of the operator, manufacturer, engineers, ATC or whatever.
The current situation is probably such that anyone unchallenged by glaring defincies in terms of motor co-ordination, analytical intelligence and a basic grounding in social skills can probably get "the gig" somewhere or other without too much difficulty if they have bottomless pockets, or connections, or preferably both - although responsible operators would presumably prefer to see some additional evidence of above average emotional stability from their CV and not just from a multiple choice questionaire which any half-wit can be drilled to pass.
Also,do not underestimate the importance of kiwi chick's question:-
Quote:
Why are you flying? Because you love being in the air and all it entails, the freedom, the fun, the absolute love?
Or because you want to sit in a bar with gold bars on your shoulders and tell all the girls you're an Airline Pilot?
To the extent that the second answer appeals to you more than the first, you are simply hoist by your own petard on account of being priced out of the gold bar market - although, as Robert Burns once said...
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gold, for a' that.
Many integrated-route FO's have shockingly little time in command outside of the little they had during a carefully structured and monitored training environment, so it is therefore little wonder that the airlines are short of pilots suitable to command their aircraft, and no pilot worth his salt would assume that anyone who happens to fly a bigger aeroplane is therefore a better pilot - although they may (or may not) be richer.
If you seriously object to the spiv culture in the airline job market, or anywhere else for that matter, and would like to see a change the way things are done, then good for you - but think carefully why, and only then how. There's no point about getting all political about the rules just because you happen to be losing in a game you'd be happy enough with if you'd been dealt a better hand.
In the meantime, straighten up and fly right... and good luck!
Last edited by Blackshift : 1st August 2007 at 14:29.
Maybe i should just hang up my headset now. Or move to England and get some proper training? 
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