Well, the future is that there is no future for a professional level of remuneration as an airline pilot. It's not me saying that but the Chairman of Aer Lingus, who I think I am right in saying also runs a bank or finance house that funds aircraft leases and purchasing.
At a London dinner I heard him tell a questioner that: "just because a job has been well paid in the past there is absolutely no reason for it to go on being so".
He went on to say that there were: "thousand of Indians and Chinese with the qualifications to fly an airliner and they would do the job for way, way less than is paid in North Western economies".
This drew an audible intake of breath from the audience both for the, (AND I EMHASISE THIS POINT), potentially racist nature of what he had said and the shock to a largely professional pilot audience that their professional lives were a waste of time in financial terms as far as he was concerned.
I emphasise that the speaker went on to say that he had not meant what he said to sound racist, and I genuinely believe that he had not meant to give that meaning to what he said. That said, it could be interpreted that way by some.
His views seem to be that the business model under which airlines work is designed to create, ultimately, a last-man-standing scenario, where the terms to customers and employees alike are dictatable in a given market sector by the last airline that survives. His assumption going forward is that a) the airline will massacre terms and conditions for pilots as a matter of business expediency in the long run and, b), of necessity in the short run.
Meanwhile, as entrants to the market for airline pilots dry up, he believes that either the job will be off-shored or immigrants will come in and take the jobs on the drastically lower terms he forsees being offered.
I must say he seemed to evince a disdain for the job that so many airline managers have that run very deep indeed. His questioner was visibly shocked by his replies and what he was told by him after the formal part of the evening was over - I know as I went over and spoke to the questioner after the dinner was over.
In my view these people, financiers and airline managers, see the job as no more than driving a lorry or a bus and in fact some people earning in those fields get more than certain turboprop FO's get now.
I think they have zero understanding of the subtleties of the job that have made it the safest form of transportation in human history, and I do not believe that immigrants will come to live in the high cost North West of Europe in order to be paid peanuts and live like paupers. There is enough demand back home, if expansion in India and China are anything to go by.
I forsee a massive cull of T's and C's, to the point where no-one who is sane and needs a proper career will enter the market and, in the end, when that lack of new entrants manifests itself in grounded hulls and a massive dilution of the overall experience base, the worm will turn again and salaries once again reflect the nature of the job - a deadly serious business with the lives of passengers and the financial future of the company at stake every time a license holder gets airborne.
Meanwhile, fat-cat bankers will go on sneering at professional pilots and enjoying lifestyles that make everyone not in a SUCCESFUL area of the finance business look a fool.