I find the world to have no shortage of people in it encouragin wannabes to spend vast sums of money on training. I have been responsible for encouraging many on just how to do so for many years. However, unlike most, I don't actually make my living out of this industry (not since 2000). This allows me the luxury of being the dissenting voice if I so choose.
I didn't imagine a house price crash in the US and recession. I'm not being tricked when I check
www.propertysnake.co.uk and see real house in my street dropping in price in the UK. My eyes do not deceive me when I gaze upon abandoned building sites in Southern Spain nor read the horror stories unfolding in the Dublin housing market. My ears did not misshear Michael O Leary's unequivocal prediction of European recession.
The halving of most airlines and holiday companies share prices in the last year persuades me that the City and the Analysts believe profits are at high risk. My reading of the broader economic cycle suggests a recession 18yrs after the last one fits a pattern. My understanding of what a credit crunch means to an economy based on credit leads me to believe we have only seen the early tremours of a quake yet to hit.
For a Wannabe in the US/UK/Eurozone who aspires to an airline job in the near future all this leads to a very gloomy conclusion. I can't help that. What I can do is try just a little to make sure people making large life decisions do so at least with some balance of opinion in the process.
It only takes one of the household airlines to go under and you have hundreds of pilots out of work. That several years supply of Wannabes. So its perhaps most sensible NOT to put yourself in a position where you owe lots of money. As I have said before over many years going Integrated DOES make sense in certain conditions. The most important of which is a frantic hiring market with Chief Pilots on the phone to Integrated schools on a weekl basis as the business plan expands yet again.
I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that the frantic hiring market is gone. So a major condition in favour of high debt, high intensity, training has also gone.
Whether we are staring into the abyss of a full blown UK/US/Eurozone recession is a more contentious issue. I think we are. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong and hope I will be. So I'm all for reading posts by optimists.
Right, back to the pool,
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