Indeed. Winter 09/10 is the Main Event. What we have seen so far is similar to the High Street. The weak, the odd, the dying for years, have all gone to the wall.
The wave of unemployment which is now baked in the cake for 2009 will be the real issue.
Once again, a study of the 1990 - 1992 period bears considerable fruit. The big airline failures came after the unemployment peak. Which in turn came after the stock market slump and house price crash and formal recession.
The HPC and Recession are now broadly beyond dispute and the stock market slump is a fact. The unemployment tidal wave is poo-poo'd by only the most optimistic and the bit we seem to be in denial about here is the big airline failures.
You have to wait for fuel hedges, currency hedges, loan arrangements and revolving credit facilities to expire before you really find out whose swimming with no trunks on. It takes time. Winter 09/10 will be that time. That is even more depressing for the eager Wannabe or someone currently training for whom the timescale of the slump needs to be as short as possible. Training is quick. The economy is slow.
And on another, broader note, I think its likely that when the crisis is over what the industry will return to will not be what it left.
By this I mean the last decade has been a bubble. A bubble in finance, housing, stock markets, commodities and most of all debt. That bubble has given us easyJet, Ryanair and all the others. Between them at least 300 new aircraft in the UK, many of them jets. That won't happen again. It won't.
What will happen is a return to a more normal (50yr norm) industry with growth in line with the general economy of around 4%. At best. You'll have small growth plus retirement plus loss of medical. Beyond that you are not going to see rampant demand for pilots for some decades. Really. The market has done a very good job in providing very cheap air transport just where and when there is any reasonable demand. We're kind of done now in the UK.
Other, large, EU countries have not had this. They are ripe for it.
Perhaps the best advice I could give a Wannabe currently cooling their heels is to learn a foreign language. German, Spanish, Italian, French would seem to be equally useful. You may well find that even a British airline would far rather you command one of those languages than have a thousand hours in your log book.
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