EZYramper: "Sorry for the idiot comment, but you're trying to make us out to be the evil people."
Apology accepted. However, you seem to have the wrong end of the stick - my post was out of concern for the way CTC cadets have been treated. I count several CTC cadets as friends and do not believe any of them are evil !
The current training system (up to first flying job), in the UK at least, has several moral problems. The roots of these can be found in:
1. The availability of easy, low interest credit - a buy it now pay later culture with dire consequences for all industries as seen in 2008, 1929 etc... The value of saving is lost on many leaving school and the return on savings has dropped with every BoE base rate cut leaving their elders with less in the bank. Without huge loans the approved courses wouldn't exist. Even rich daddies want to see a return on their investment - or at least a reasonable timescale for repayment even if interest free. The promises of £100k+ salaries and final salary pension schemes now look like fairy tales to those starting with the airlines now.
2. The change from National CAA ratings to JAR - where a CPL once required 700 hours before issue and pilots were either military, sponsored or self improver. The exams were reduced from BCPL/CPL/ATPL to just frozen ATPL. A direct result has come back to haunt EASA with the lack of youngsters wanting to go into instructional flying and hence the current debate on paying PPLs to instruct.
3. The promise by certain Flight Schools that their system was far better and their special relationship with the Airlines was a money spinner. This, whether by design or not, reduced the kudos of the self improver route to both wanabees and a few airlines. Over the past 5 years even those leaving military flying backgrounds have found they are no longer 1st choice for a few Airline HR departments.
4. Student impatience (?) and the need to pay back huge loans: Why work as an Instructor, fly Light Twins for a pitance, tow gliders, fly turbo-props, or work your way up the airline ladder (aka FAA) to FO on heavy jets when you can do a zero to hero package for £100k and around 2 years....?
5. HR departments replacing Chief Pilots: Yes, most CPs still have a major say in who is taken on. But in the 21st century airlines rely increasingly on recruiting agencies or their own HR who put wanabees through many more tests than ever before. Some are very good at weeding out poor prospects. On the other hand you have the "but you don't have 478 P1 hours on type" when you might have 458 hours...... Today, it is much more artificial - ticks in boxes rather than calls to the CP or airport visits to chat about flying opportunities. Just add in point 3 and offer Airlines a extra tier of HR and hey presto.....
6. Lack of strong pilot community/union or disillusionment with current options.
7. The advent of LoCo - golden handshakes for those able to get the ball rolling in the 1990s and then ever reducing Ts&Cs for the newbees - especially after 911/SARS/Fuel price rises/industry woes.
The results?
1. Pay for your own Type Rating up front - now common place where it was almost unheard of 10 years back.
2. Ripping FOs off for flying passengers: Folks believing they are not paying to fly airliners when the Approved School hands back £6k over 6 months before the Airline lets them go for at least 6 months. Or paying for Line Flying £20k for 300 - 500 hrs with no prospects of a job there after.
3. More and more low houred FOs who will meet the legal requirements and can score very highly in routine SIM assessments. They will get more hours in the 6 months but then loose continuity having been fired again. And what sort of flying would most of those hours be? (Maybe manual T/Os and Landings would be a better measure of experience).
4. No experience outside of automated environment - even with 1000s of hours on a modern airliner (Q400, 737, A320) recent events have shown the need for basic airmanship - particularly with Auto Throttle and Speed monitoring.
5. Additional workload on Captains Line flying (covering for missed ATC calls, extra monitoring as PNF etc) and with changes every 6 months, greater stresses on Training department programmes and Instructors.
This is certainly not a definitive list so feel free to add to it or comment.....