I’m pleased to see your experience in airline recruitment Calypso, that’s an experience I don’t have.
However, what I do have is a 36 year career in aviation during which time I have worked for eight airlines and undertaken six type ratings. I’ve never put any money up front into any sort of “cadetship”, I’ve never worked just for flight pay in order to get a type rating, but it did take ten years of hard aviation graft and 5000 hours in GA before I got a job in an airline. To my mind it’s not people who might be prepared to take a pay cut to keep their jobs in the face of an unprecedented global pandemic who are destroying this profession. It was destroyed when companies like Astreus, Ryanair, EasyJet and all the others started to schemes where holders of fATPLs could get a type rating and then fly for 500 hours effectively for free in the hope of getting a permanent job. But even then those schemes wouldn’t have destroyed the profession and started a race to the bottom unless those fATPL holders hadn’t jumped on the band wagon to avoid working their way up through instructing, single crew air taxi, regional turboprops etc on the way to a shiny jet.
And you’re right, the maths about career earnings is simple. Having had to survive for some of those years on savings due to airline failures I, unlike you, couldn’t afford to sit at home waiting for the good times to come back. And if I did in two years time I would be looking for a job having no current type rating, not having flown for two years, having only three years to retirement and competing with thousands of out of work pilots from BA, Virgin, Norwegian, Thomas Cook, Flybe, Emirates and possibly every other airline on the planet.
So however much you want to pontificate I will do what I need to do to keep a job and put the money in the bank that my family needs, and I’m sure I won’t be alone in that. And if that means accepting a pay cut for a while then I’ll do it. And if that means that someone with ten or twenty or thirty years of earning potential ahead of them are upset then so be it, why should I sacrifice what is left of my career to help you with yours.