Well there is two answers:
- No quality has not fallen dramatically
- There is a shortage of pilots trained at that means airlines are now hiring people that were 5 years ago were not even considered
So as a summary: there is a shortage of well qualified candidates and the well qualified candidates are picked up almost immediately...
Depends who you work for and which candidates are applying! I agree that the quality of the
top candidates is still the same however there are a lot more candidates who should not be allowed anywhere near a plane. Once the top candidates are taken there are plenty of airlines mainly towards eastern Europe, Asia etc who seem to hire these people who really don't have any idea about flying or the motor skills to safely fly an aircraft.
There is definitely a problem with communication in my opinion. I was line training a new first officer recently who seemed to be completely lost. The problems continued with other training captains over several flights with no improvements so some inquiries were made. It turns out that this person had problems all the way through flight school and all the way through the type rating but somehow managed to pass the important tests even though there was an underlying problem. This person should have been stopped at a much earlier stage and not allowed through the system. Its easy to talk about Swiss cheese models for aviation accidents but what about maybe the flight schools using the same model to catch students who are not up to the task.
It is quite scary to think that the same person was asked to leave and has recently gone and joined another airline in the central / eastern part of Europe
