Hear hear DB6
It wasn't that long ago that I was in the hunt for the first turboprop job (3 years ago to be precise) and the standard deal on offer for jobs at Logan, Eastern, Flybe, Highland, Scotairways etc was a 2-year reducing bond of between £6 and £9K. No cash up front or any outrageous nonsense like that.
What I find most disgusting is the crass profit margin they're taking. If any of you guys decide to go impersonate an airline manager, and ring up Saab to get a quote for training some new pilots (or BAE or any other European turboprop training provider, there's not a huge price difference for any turboprop rating really) you will find that the general wholesale cost to the airline customer including ground school and LST, for TWO pilots to be trained together as sim partners, is around £12 - £14K total, or £6 - 7K each. As for charging for line training - AARRGGHHH don't even get me started, lets just say I can start to see where A320rider is coming from! I'm not so naive though as to think that shedloads of wannabes STILL won't queue up to do it and I'm pretty much through wasting my breath on pprune about how bad these deals are.
I just hope and pray that Logan get what they deserve from it, which is that their crew take the piss out of them to the same extent they are dishing it out - that ultimately every single one of their FO's extends two fingers and bails out to a real job as soon as they've got 1000 hours, that their captain shortage reaches even bigger crisis levels real soon, the last few remaining training captains bail out, the whole schedule comes unstuck, then BA audit them and sack the entire ops management team for such crass mismanagement of their crewing levels and they are replaced with someone who's got a clue about long term management strategy.
