Thanks for the info flyera359. Sad that it seems to have come to this.. Before at least Cathay was paying for your training so even though the salary wasn't great you'd still be better off than if you went self-funded, now this doesn't seem to be the case!
Just wanted to confirm that as an ab-initio pilot you would lose both HKPA and have to pay $16,000/mth for training costs? If this were the case then as a first year SO you would only take home $15,000/mth net, (from the handbook SO1 pay is ~$31,000/mth) surely Cathay can not expect that to be an attractive package for anyone as that won't even pay rent on even a 700 sq. ft. apartment... Also some people have been saying that they will only recoup 50% of training costs while you're saying it will be the whole thing. How much actually are the training costs in the end? I can't seem to find any reference to this in the documents you posted.