I think the real shortage is of Captains not FO's - if you look around some of the chatter on the Far East forum you'll get the impression pretty quickly that there's plenty of Malaysian citizen low time CPL/IRs who are pretty bloody keen to work for MAS but can't get a look in. Just because they've got minimums of CPL/IR doesn't mean jack - I mean those are also the minimum requirements for Qantas too aren't they?
http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthr...hreadid=174623
Not really sure but I suspect it just can't be that easy ... they were advertising in Flight a couple of months back as I recall ... I know of at least one turboprop captain with around 4000 hours from around work here, and two FOs both with over 1000, all of who applied and and all got the big PFO a few weeks later
