Originally Posted by
Chris the Robot
You'd think it would be sensible for all of the UK-based airlines to group together and open their own integrated flight school to handle all of their cadet needs. Complete quality control from day one and much lower costs. I believe TUI Belgium reckoned it costs €60-70k to get someone from the street to the RHS now that their cadet scheme is on an in-house integrated course.
That way there would be very few unemployable trainees and probably a higher standard of training. I doubt it'd be quite like the days when they did circuits around Shannon in a real VC-10 (though I did hear somewhere that Swissair had even better training) but I imagine it'd be pretty good.
The only real barrier would be a lack of willingness amongst the airlines to finance it properly, though given the cost-cutting shenanigans at one or two places this could actually be quite a big problem.
It really wouldn't cost a massive airline like Ryanair, which has no debt and huge profits, a lot of money to buy a hand full of PA28s, DA42s, a airfield, a hangar, a building and employ a few instructors. They already own the expensive training devices i.e. 737 sims. I think they will catch on eventually, especially if they intend to grow to 1000 a/c by 2030.