Originally Posted by
Brutal
If onshore want to recruit and retain pilots in the future they will seriously have to look at paying more than what is being offered! There are way fewer guys leaving the forces, and depending on their original joining date with H.M., will not have immediate access to their pensions to boost their pay...there's a huge number of guys reaching 60 soon, offshore is picking up, the airlines are booming, HEMS day VFR ops going into IFR, night, and unsociably hours than before but expecting to pay the same....and for the first time onshore is using types 145/169 that offshore is now using...lots of guys defected already from SAS/Babcock to go offshore doing the wind farm work with unifly/wiking etc as they get a substantial pay increase, and ironically only work day vfr??? Just shows how poorly paid our Hems is!!
Banging my head against a brick wall trying to recruit onshore....with the usual excuses from management but even they acknowledge we are going to have to do something drastic soon, as vacancies being left unfilled for far too long, and it is not going to get any better..
B.
Personally I think as an aside to the pay, the whole experience criteria in the UK specially needs some attention. I'm not suggesting putting a fresh 185hr CPL on to a type rating course and letting them loose, but in reality if a HEMS pilot needs 2,500hrs plus 135/145 type rating, plus significant low level experience, plus winching experience etc etc where are these going to come from if not ex-mil? If pay is well below par, where do companies expect to get pilots from?
Personally I've ticked the box with exams, built up hours to get above the minimum for carrying out the practical part of the CPL course, but now I've stopped. I don't want to instruct to the 2,500hr point before I'm eligible for another type of job, typically as I don't see a great rush of fresh PPL(H) students on the sideline, so the 2,500hrs may well take years, and those years would be spent earning around £40-£50 an hour whilst flying, everything else for me as an instructor would be "free". I don't know if it's worth gaining my CPL/ATPL anymore. I've often been tempted to approach operators such as SAS or Babcock etc to ask about acting as supernumerary crew, but I don't think this could even be possible in today's heavily legislated industry.