The Truth - or a social lie.
I visited the RMIT Open day at Point Cook today. The instructors did a good job spreading the word on how to be a pilot, but with several hundred airline pilots also looking for work in GA, I felt that newly graduated CPL pilots are going to find it difficult to get employment in the next few years.
I got talking to three young people who were in a classroom swotting for the IREX. The talk turned to what happens once they attain their CPL. None particularly wanted to spend money on a flying instructor course, but saw the qualification as the only way to get a job. I suggested that they should consider following the CPL with an instrument rating - particularly as some employers demand a minimum of three renewals and by this measure, the earlier an instrument rating, the better.
Another student was worried about the cost of an instrument rating, quoted as $10,000. Still another wondered would he/she would ever get a job with only 200 hours. They all talked vaguely of "going up north" after graduation, as if Darwin was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I wanted to say to them get out of aviation before you send your parents broke, because currently there is only heartbreak ahead amid the red dust of the Northern Territory.
But it would have been cruel to dash their dreams of being a pilot - because in the long run, getting a job depends so much on who you know plus a lot of sheer good luck and hard study.
Fifty years ago almost to the day, I sat in a similar classroom just across the road at Point Cook where I met these young people. Then I was a trainee pilot in the RAAF anxiously studying airmanship (yes..that was a specific subject in those days), aerody, met, morse and navigation and we even learned to throw hand grenades. From the airfield came the wonderful noises of Tiger Moths and Wirraways jostling in the circuit area and the occasional magical sound of a Mustang or two slipping across from Laverton.
My flying future was assured, providing I didn't get scrubbed on the Wings test. We had full board and lodging and our training didn't cost us a cent. From there I spent 18 happy years flying everything from fighters to bombers to transports. I never had it so good, although I didn't realise it at the time.
Outside the RMIT classroom today, I heard the sound of the RAAF Museum Mustang putting on a flying display and I thought back to the day when I first flew a Mustang with only 210 hours in my log book.
Through the windows I could see a line of Cherokee Warriors. Each hour in one of these aircraft costs just under $200 to the student and perhaps even a house mortgage to the parents. And for what? At least I had a job after graduation. But the students today have no jobs to go to, only the cost of more ratings to get ahead of the mob. Fifty thousand dollars outlay still won't get you a job in GA.
How do you give words of encouragement to these starry eyed student pilots, when deep down, you know full well that their future employment opportunities in the current aviation environment is grim indeed. Does one tell them the truth, or a social lie...
I wish I knew the answer.