What is wrong with all you people?
The only reason anybody has to pay to fly anything, is because you are all hell bent on skipping your traditional apprenticeships in smaller aircraft and flying a big boeing or airbus straight out of school.
The whole world outside of Europe operates on the principle of : do your CPL/IR, get job flying air taxi or flight instructing or banner towing, get 1000 hours, get job on turboprop or regional jet, do two or three years in the RHS and the same again in the left, then get into the big aircraft after that.
It's a principle that has worked soundly and kept sufficient experience levels in flight decks to maintain passenger safety for most of the last century.
The problem is, that this whole industry that's sprung up in the last few years selling bogus jet jobs to rich kids for ever-increasingly-absurd sums of money, is obscenely profitable, and it has gotten into bed with every owner of every big European flying school in the last 5 or 10 years. It started with the first ones to sell MCC courses in the mid 90s, then buy-a-type-rating in the late 90s, and now with all this buying hours on jets thing, they are absolutely CREAMING you lot for money. Why do you think Oxford is now owned by a venture capital organisation? They wouldn't have touched them 10 years ago, until the big investors suddenly noticed that large and well-respected commercial flying training organisations had become absurdly profitable with all these add-ons they were now selling.
Now of course it's impossible to go through flying school without being repeatedly clubbed over the head with this grand illusion they have created, that you have to buy hours and ratings on big jets and all that bullsh!t as part of their training package.
Wake up and smell the coffee you lot. You DON'T have to buy your way into any job. These charlatans selling all these "experience on jet" schemes have tried to throw a curtain over the fact that the whole world of traditional flying experience is still available and still needs pilots just like it always has. Go and get paid while you learn to fly "properly" on flight instructing/air taxi, then regional airlines, when the time is right and you send those CVs to decent respectable jet airlines they will not only snap you up they will pay you a proper wage, and you won't even have a dirty great hundreds of thousands of euros to pay back to the bank.
And as Mercenary Pilot alludes to, although his words are harsh, I am also of the shared opinion with him that the quality control of these schemes is highly doubtful, and the time will come when someone who is paying to sit in the RHS will be involved or implicated in a large fatal accident. Watch the politicians move very fast to close off access to these kind of schemes very quickly when that day comes.
Those of you who don't read the Down Under / Australia forums here on this website should have a look at some of the debate that's been raging over there about the Lockhart River metroliner crash, apparently the FO in that one was some kind of pay-to-fly candidate, and it already looks like a lot of pressure is being applied to the CAA from influential people in government to make sure it can't happen again. Imagine if it was a boeing or airbus in a big city
