Have we all been looking at this the wrong way?
Any of you guys read Flight International this week? Probably a dumb question. 'Straight and Level' has a '50 years ago' column. And 50 years ago the price of a transatlantic return flight was reduced to around about £250. Yes £250. Cost of a transatlantic return flight today - well blow me down if you look in the back of the sunday papers it's £200. So who is going to pay me 20 grand a month to do that then I wander?
Secondly
In the good ol' days a tried and tested route to airline flying was to instruct/ fly air taxi/ fly a banderante/fly anything or any combination of these. And we all did it because we knew that when we made captain in a shiny jet it was payback time financially speaking. I know single blokes who lived in the old pig stys at Headcorn for a pound a night because they were instructing and they couldn't afford anything else. The difference then is that BA were paying theeir top blokes £150k pa and the top line elsewhere was good as well. I have lived in a caravan to afford it. Has anybody done a cost analysis of this? Who is better off- the ones who go without for years, or the ones who have earnt money and then spent it on something stupid like a type rating? And people with rich parents are excluded from this argument. And so are people who have spent a load of money then whinge about it on pprune day and night.Whichever way you look at it, I personally will always be financially less well off because of my flying habit.
And yes I will do the line training my last contract was working in live sewers so I think I have bloody earned it!