Some top stuff on here since last night - very entertaining reading after an early 4-sector slog.
What struck me is the reaction of people here to what they consider 'negativity'. The big problem is that things ARE now a lot more negative than they were a few years ago. People who have been through the course and contribute to this thread are not doing it just to irritate you and try to put you off training to fly. What would we have to achieve by doing that? I have a job and am happy. Uneasy about the industry and what the future holds, but generally happy. I'm not bothered whether you want to train or not, but what I AM bothered about is - having been there and done that - seeing wannabes fall hook, line and sinker for the FTO marketing nonsense and the bleating about a global shortage of airline pilots, etc etc. Please understand that the best people to learn about the course from, are people who have done it. People who can give you an objective, unbiased view of what it's like, what the job is like afterwards, and what it's like to shoulder that debt for 7 years (or longer) of your life. This is the kind of thing you don't hear about at dressed-up sales pitches and meet-and-greets. Understand that there is a difference between negativity and realism. Things ARE negative at the moment - that's the way it is. Please take this in the way that it's intended - not trying to preach or be patronising, just trying to be helpful. To those of you wise enough to do your research and think long and hard before committing to the course, like mattyh1986, well done - if you really feel it's for you, then do it, and I genuinely wish you the very best of luck with it.
Nothing will change my personal viewpoint that to risk your parents' home on training to enter a volatile industry that has thousands of experienced, qualified people out of work, during such a disastrous time for the economy, is a completely ludicrous thing to do. One of my father's colleagues has a son who started at one of the big integrated FTOs not too far back. He'd been taken in by the
PR and marketing hype and remortgaged his house to enable his son to train. He is now in a constant state of worry at whether he'll still have a roof over his head in a couple of years' time once the repayments are due to start and his son can't even get a job stacking shelves. It's happening, and I don't know what it takes for some people to wake up and realise this. That £60k isn't just a number on a piece of paper that you can come back to another day. It's real money that you have to pay back, and a horrendously big chunk of real money at that. And when you find you can't, someone WILL come after you for whatever you've got it secured on. Think how you'd feel if you were helping your parents pack their car with whatever belongings they hadn't had repossessed to drive away from their lovely house for the last time after handing the keys to some faceless bank, with nowhere to go to. Is it a risk worth taking, for a "dream"? It's not like the old days when the money was unsecured, and believe me that burden is bad enough.
Originally Posted by 99jolegg
Is any of this really true? Wasn't the number of cadets "dumped" around 32? Around 20 odd from EZY and 11 odd from MON? Haven't 90% of them already been re-employed at Aer Lingus, Gulf Air and EZY Swiss?
22 from EZY - 15 of which were Wings Cadets, the rest Wings ATP. I believe it was 8 at Monarch, comprising 7 cadets and 1 ATP. Total 30. I don't know where you got this 90% figure from, but ONE went to Gulf Air, TWO went to EZY Switzerland and about 14, I believe, went to Aer Lingus. The rest either dropped off the radar or are going back to EZY this summer on FlexiCrew terms.