PilotLZ
yes, quite possibly.
Since the late 90’s when Mr O’Leary stated that he only wanted one pilot in the flight deck and clearly that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, the cheapest interim option was the way to go. At about the same time Joint Aviation Requirements brought the hours for a CPL issue down from 700 hours to 250 hours. This opened the floodgates to a whole generation of “wannabes” who thought that 250 hours was the new golden ticket to the right hand seat of a 737 or A320. Prior to this era of deregulation there were “fast track” pathways to airline careers via a handful of “approved” schools. Suddenly, Puddlewick-in-the-Marsh flying club rebranded itself as the Puddlewick-in-the Marsh Airline Academy. Sadly, the output vastly exceeded the real world demand. Many of the larger airlines continued to source from the newer iterations of what were previously the “approved” schools.
The reason JAR brought the “non-approved” hours requirement down by nearly two thirds was because the CPL was the new aerial work licence, much as it properly was everywhere else in the world. It was then that the ATPL should have been regulated as the licence required for Airline Transport flying. I am sure Mr O’Learly was delighted, and for 20 years many thousands of hopeful aspirants have been able to squabble ad-infinitum about “modular and integrated” and how unfair it is that airlines aren’t snapping them up with their 250 hours. Add to that, the reality that even the airline apprenticeship programmes were so oversubscribed that they could transfer the entire financial risk burden to the trainees and you end up with the situation you have today! More properly you have the situation you had up until March this year.
Commercial aviation has been turned on its head by this disaster. As the world eventually recovers from this, and allowing for “grandfather” transition periods, it is an ideal opportunity for the regulations to properly rebalance the situation. The ATPL should become the baseline qualification for the right hand seat of an airliner. Beyond that, a properly structured airline programme should become the fast track route. Radical? Not really, it’s the way it is in the US and pretty much the way it was prior to JAR and then later EASA.