Once you get rid of the tire kickers and the sticky beaks and then start whittling away st the candidate list you’re left with people who STILL have to be able to pony up some serious $$$ in order to undertake the course.
500 a year is 40 new starters every month. They’ll all need to do circa 150 hours for a CPL- although a proper airline flying training academy should be looking at more than the bare minimum.
Once you sort out the subjects the flying is done in roughly a 12 month time frame. So a minimum of 75,000 hours per annum. They won’t fly 7 days a week so it’ll be closer to 5 so that’s 260 available flying days- less if you knock out public holidays. It’ll be hard to average more than 8 hours stick per day per aeroplane so 8 x 260 is the total number of hours an aeroplane will do per annum. Once you include the 100 hourlies it’s going to decrease again. Back of the envelope calculations are somewhere north of 50 aeroplanes.
They’ll likely need an instructor for half to two thirds of the course so likely to need north of 50 flying instructors too. Realistically they’ll need closer to 70 I reckon
Can anyone realistically see this occurring at any existing facility in Australia? Can anyone seeing it happening in Australia ever? Where are they going to find 70ish flying instructors who are of a decent standard and aren’t trying to hour build or are recent graduates (which again is hardly the standard to be seeking)?
I wish them luck. I reckon the first graduates will come out no earlier than mid 2020.