Forums are known for their negativity. It is the typical case where if you had a good meal, good flight, good hotel stay you rarely make the effort to visit a forum and impart your appreciation, but if you had a bad experience then one would be quick to tell their friends and everyone about it.
If you go onto the other forums - spectators gallery, questions, tech log, night stop etc, you will see good old banter posts between pilots. You will see how content and happy they are and more importantly, how to rip the p1ss out of each other without being offensive or waking up the moderator. This is the type of talk you get in the cockpit - perhaps not so much in SH flights where a good majority of your time would be spent in a sterile cockpit environment.
The point I am trying to make is that it is not all bad! At a guess, there must be thousands of current pilots on pprune but they are not all here saying how bad the industry is. How many Ryanair pilots are there who come onto this forum slating their company and working conditions? If there are any, I have not read many posts. Whenever I read a post on the wannabe forum slating Ryanair and the like, it is usually from redundant 10'000TT+ pilots who are sick at the fact they can not get a job as Ryanair prefers £30K cadets, or those recently out of Flight Training who can not afford to pay for a Type rating - with Ryanair or otherwise.
I will not blame you guys that I have just mentioned for feeling this way or writing negative comments on the forum. I would feel the same. In fact I do feel the same sometimes. I have been a ppruner for many years under another name. However as I have been flying LH since I was 21, I was starting to get bored - really bored. I've been on the 747 since I was 21. So I became a wannabe just like the rest of you. I made myself a new name and decided to poke around the wannabe forums - just to see what is going around in this world. I need to get the flying bug back!!
Basically, I'm looking for a short haul airline who will value my 10 years of 732, 742F and 744 experience and who will pay for my TR - whilst keeping me on the salary I am on now! The simple truth is that it is not going to happen - purely because of you guys out there - Thanks! And because there is a surplus of "you guys" out there, the T&Cs are low for those type of airlines - not much of a reward after 1-3 years of hard work and circa £70K spent is it?
The negative things you are reading here on pprune really are not the norm in the wider international airline industry - the place where I assume you all want to aspire to. You may well get 10 responses here from current pilots saying I'm talking rubbish but they will just be the 10. Not the Tens of thousands who fly A340s/777s/747s everyday who are happy and content.
The sandpit is the same. You will read negative posts from EK pilots but the same few names crop up again and again. The same with Fragrant Harbour.
The point is once you get to a top notch airline, then things really are as good as JB001 says it is. You get many days off, especially if LH, money is good (not as good as it once was), destinations are good, hotels are good - without giving too much away, 2 nights ago I shared a few drinks with a certain music mogul next to a very fine hotel swimming pool. The negative flip side being that a few weeks ago, I found myself inadvertantly in the same bar as a L.G.B.T meet - not so many "L"s about
which could have been interesting.
At the moment, the industry is in bad way. But all industries are. Strikes are happening, crime is on the increase, motivation is down and all the usual crap that comes with a recession (I really should stop picking up the Daily Mail once I get to Heathrow). Negativity on pprune is no exception. I just want you all to realise that whilst it may take a long time to get "there", once you are there you really do live the dream everyday - even in a lo-co airline. I've said it before, I have a fair few friends in Ryanair who after being with the company for quite a few years are on excellent pay, lots of hands on flying, tons of T/Os and landings - in short they are loving it. Plus they don't have to wear a pollution mask once they exit the terminal at their home base.
My advice to wannabes reading this particular thread is that use a little bit of sense - especially right now. Don't rush into anything. If you have a job - keep it and go mod. Always have a back-up plan because it could be a good 5 years before airlines mop up redundant experienced pilots. But once you get here, it really is not that bad.