One wonders what the reaction of today's ba beancounters would be to the concept of training their own pilots on an 18-month course!
And what would their reaction be to the amount of base training. After the two weeks and forty landings mentioned in my post number 3 we were issued with a "landing card" which allowed you to fly a sector by day only, when flying with a training captain. It took a further three visits to either Shannon or Bedford to be issued with an unrestricted landing card. Add to that the cost of training all of your pilots to navigate (the full Flight Navigators Licence) and taking them off line during the nav training.
The beancounters must have had heart attacks.