While I am against working for free and also symphatise with VT's position I have tried to be neutral in this and can fully understand what he's gone through and its not too hard to see why he made that decision. I know a lot of people wore than would like to admit going through the sstr route.
Even easyjet does it in a different way for cadets. With CTC you get 1k a month for six months.
I decided to train to be a pilot to fufill a childhood dream and was under no illusions about the sacrifices involved. If I wanted to make money I could have stayed in properties which is how I was able to pay fopr this course in the first place. However I have managed to keep my total debts excluding mortgage to 22k.
As scroggs as stated it is unethical to offer your services for free however in capitalist societies like ours there's something called market forces. To those who want to fly to make money I will advice you to look at other proffessions like IT. You can train to be a server engineer and earn over a a thousand pounds a week with less than two months training. Better still if you want an easy way to earn money go and become a roll out enginer (Software installation) you are looking at 4k a month and all you have to do is put disc into brand new computers and follow simple steps something most people on this forums can do.
If you want to do the above wait a couple of months after microsoft vista bugs have been fixed and a lot of city banks want to upgrade thier computer systems. You can work for seven months and afford to take the rest of the year off.
I am mentioning this becauce the above industries value thier business and will go to extra ordinary lenghts to make sure it runs smoothly. A computer crash in morgan stanley will cost them millions in a matter of hours and in the airline industry planes sitting on the ground without pilots to fly them will be a disaster for any airline company. While I fully appreciate scroggs point of view and understands his disgust with what he sees happening compared to what it was when he joined. Those in the industry are in a far better position to change the terms and conditions than those of us coming into it.
I will really be worried as a captain constantly flying with first officers who have a huge amount of debt that is sometimes enough to cause pshycological problems in an individual. A lot of people here mention 100k in my eight years of working in mental hospitals I've seen people have a mental breakdown with a lot less debt. This includes bank managers, doctors, senior nurses, yes! being admitted into mental institutions.
Having not been selected by ryanair myself I am prepearing to go Africa where you dont have to pay to fly and you actually get your type rating paid for. I have a lot of friends flying there and they earn more as first officers
(Flying for British oil companies in west Africa) than a lot of turbo prop capts here. You also get the fact that life is cheaper(not literaly). No way will people over there work for free the Government will not stand for it let alone the workers.
I have applied so far to a couple of companies and have five rejection letters with my name on it . Like VT said some dont even bother replying like flybe and bmi baby and not just to me but a lot of others. You then find out later that these companies went to meet an integrated school to ask them to supply them with twenty pilots. From my obseravtion its no longer enough to be a good pilot you need deep pockets to get your foot on the job ladder except you're very lucky to go to the right school and know the right people.
Its a good thing that a lot of flying is now automated I can imagine a
situation whereby a first officer will have to take controls in an emergency but his mind is pretty occupied with financial problems and he's not able to concentrate. It will be interesting to see a panorama documentary on the state of this industry.
However like someone mentioned earlier I will like to see what is done in North America and Canada done here you cannot apply for commercial job until you reach a certain number of hours usually over a thousand this will weed out those who have no stomach for hard work and those trying to rely on bank of parents to shove them into jet jobs. A couple of companies have raised thier hours for cadets and first officers becauce they had problems with training low hour pilots. A friend returned from Canada recently where his friend run a flying school and was told nobody there will hire you to fly a kingair until you had at least 1200 hours. He was told that by then at least you know how to land a plane.
I dont know how the lobbying industry works in this country if theres any in aviation I think reasonable people at the CAA should stop this practice of cadets working for free. Not only is it unethical it is unhealthy giving the level of debt incured during the training something that is not yet apparent until God forbid a crash happens and an investigation uncovers the background and discovers how the current working conditions have contributed to it.
Vortex thing I wish you all the best and like the old saying goes
If you can't beat them you join them.
