Thank you for all your replies – some very valid points indeed. However I feel that perhaps I did not express my own point clearly enough to begin with:
Firstly, there are swarms of us wannabe’s (or idiots as Scroggs so kindly refers to us) who will always be only too happy to walk through the door of an FTO and fork out for training after looking through the nice shiny brochures that they produce and seeing all of the encouraging (seemingly) statistics about how many jobs there are and how well all there graduates do etc etc.
Secondly, the FTO’s will always accept these wannabe’s (or their money at least) with open arms and I don’t think that it is unrealistic to say that the primary goal of any FTO is to make profit, regardless of the end effect on the little guy (i.e. the wannabe). These are not public institutions after all and they exist to make money for the people who own them (I would like to stress here that I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with this in itself – capitalism works).
My suggestion with regards to regulation of pilot throughput was just that – a suggestion. In fact it was more of a crude example than anything else – I was simply trying to articulate my overall point that perhaps something could be done to regulate or change the current situation. What this could possibly be I do not know – I do not understand economics or politics or the legal system in this country well enough to produce a complete and infallible solution, however I am only too sure that there must be people out there a hell of a lot cleverer than I am who could do something to better the system as it currently stands.
I do not think it can be denied that there lies a potential problem for little guy here, as I have already described (being left with heap loads of debt and unemployed).
I also think that some of the replies here seem to give evidence to a point that I made in my initial post that there is an attitude amongst pilot’s that ‘this is the way things are and that’s that, like it or lump it.’ Why? Why put up with a system that has these obvious risks and simply accept them?
In summary, what I really want to know is, do people genuinely feel that there is absolutely nothing that could be done to change the current system for the better, or atleast to offer some sort of protection for the individuals (wannabe’s) who have very little power within the industry?
Cheers guys,
Scott.
P.S - "Essentially what you are saying is you'd like to force the airlines to hire license holders they have determined are less desirable, simply because you feel sorry those license holders have debt." Nimbus - I appreciate your commets but I have said what I mean, there is no need to read between the lines, so please do not put words in my mouth.