Your post is very useful to many parents with dreamy kids who want this life. A lot of good, no great actually, advice has been given here answering specifically the questions you have asked. Listen to them and show your son the replies.
I will not go over old ground, Instead I will come at it from a different angle which is THE PILOT – the finished entity.
What surprised me most in this industry and still does today is the attitude and personality that pilots must have, a certain profile as it were. In any other industry, the interview and subsequent recruitment of a candidate is highly based on merit. This may be due to the technical nature of the job, experience required, and of course discriminatory laws.
However, in pilot recruitment it is totally different. You see every single pilot has put their life and soul into training, spent copious amounts of money, perhaps got divorced over it, dreamt about it their whole life blah blah blah. No one gives a monkeys. Every budding pilot in that interview room is a highly trained professional. He/she has committed and sacrificed so much for a job that is not guaranteed. There is NO other industry out there where a person pays anywhere up to £100K without the guarantee of a job.
Now here is the killer. It does not matter how well you performed in the Sim or how well you answered the technical parts of the interview, if you do not have “IT” then you will not get hired. Personality is so important. You need to have confidence to speak, to joke. You need to show the guys at the other side of the table that you are someone they can be with for X amount of hours in the cockpit, as well as the bar in the hotel.
Is your son the type of person who, at a family gathering or a gathering of friends that he may not know well, will hide in the corner and only speak when spoken to? Has he just got one good friend who he has known since he was 4 and he/she is all he hangs around with? Is he a funny guy without being rude, racist or annoying? And no offence but how does he look? Does he have any interesting stories, any life experiences that he could bring up at an interview?
I know what I’m saying here may beggar belief and most non-pilots here would say I’m talking out of my rear end. Hell, perhaps even current pilots may say I am over exaggerating things but I really do want to give you an insight as to what an airline looks for.
If you have are the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge with 100% in your ATPLs and the best stick and rudder skills in the world but you have the personality of a brussel sprout, then you are not going to be an airline pilot. Not now, not ever.
Singapore Airlines have an ab-inito pilot scheme. They have a set amount of stages. Medicals, interviews, aptitude tests etc. However the final stage is called a “Tea-Party”. The remaining cadets are invited to a function room to eat, to drink, to socialise. Within that room are also serving pilots and of course the Chief Pilot. They are monitoring all perspective recruits. How they act, how they socialise. Are they trying to act sociable or are they naturally sociable? Does the drink go to their heads? How do they act around the few flight attendants that are also strategically placed in the room? Can you imagine it? All those recruitment stages, the medical, the interviews. Yet the final judgement is how you act at the “tea-party”.
You know your son better than the rest of us. So here is the killer question:
Does he have what it takes to be an Airline Pilot?