Angrywife a few words from the ‘excuses and crap’ department. I’ve been involved in training, management and recruiting in the airlines for about a quarter of a century and have as a consequence some sense of what is wanted by these carriers and how the positions within them are allocated.
As many of the posts here indicate, your anger is, sadly, based upon a somewhat false premise – that is that if you go out and fund yourself by fabulous amounts of cash, that this in itself should raise your chances of getting that first job. Furthermore, you seem to feel that there is in some way a moral obligation on the airlines to employ such a candidate in preference to say, someone who’s Father paid for the training or who has in other ways not suffered the same financial stress. In short – you paid a fortune, so we ‘owe you one’ for bothering. It is a simple fact that this is simply not the way it works and the airlines are generally, I’m sorry to tell you, almost entirely indifferent to the source of finance for the original training. The fairness or otherwise of that fact is, I’m afraid, neither here nor there. There is a frequently held view that the passion and dedication shown by re-mortgaging your house etc and putting yourself in debt by enormous amounts will somehow impress the airlines with your fantastic tenacity against the odds and make you the prime candidate. Sorry, but this is bunkum – utter baloney. When we are trying to fill that coveted right-hand seat with a balanced mix of experience we are interested in how well you fly, how well you ‘fit in’ (and there’s a subject on it’s own worth its own thread!) how you present yourself, how articulate you are, whether you’re a closet psychotic, how well you have prepared for both the interview and your career… well, the list goes on and on, but generally your previous financial arrangements don’t feature too highly. Ability does.
As it happens, I personally view the emergence of total self-finance as entirely lamentable, but it is an absolute fact that whether you, your partner or I like it or not, the market dominates. At this time the airlines are not short of applications from inexperienced pilots like your chap – in fact we are swamped with ‘em. It is experienced pilots that are in short supply, and the recruitment people must balance the experience levels across their fleets. You simply cannot have an airline full of what many companies choose to call ‘cadets’ so places for such pilots will be, of necessity, limited. And, by the way, in nearly forty years as a pilot I have only once seen someone shoehorned in by his Father .. and ironically, however much we hated the situation – and we did, believe me – he turned out to be a really first class pilot, damnit.
For what it’s worth, I love the opportunity to give someone like your bloke a chance, but it it’s clearly impossible to give ‘em all a go, and it so happens that at this moment my particular outfit have no vacancies for ‘newbies.’ It’s simply a commercial fact – in no way is it a vendetta against people like your partner. Eventually there’ll be vacancies, but it’s solely the commercial success of the airline that will determine when they occur.
I can speak with some authority on this subject for another reason than the rôle I hold now. I was in precisely the same position when I started. I commenced flight training in my late teens, and checked out in the right hand seat of an airliner at age 29 and I was flat, stony broke when I did - so 8 months is not a huge amount in that context eh? So, keep the faith, keep looking and pray for some luck – an element that holds more of a grip on success than it has a right to.
There has been a lot of really good advice in this thread – and may I direct you again to the post by scroggs – someone who writes total good sense in thread after thread; also the words from the Wee Weasly Welshman .. and ignore the disgraceful post from S Artois.
Good luck - genuinely - good luck.