It is quite interesting to see everyone fawning over someone who got hired somewhere so young, but HAD TO PAY THROUGH THE NOSE FOR THE JOB?! £88,000? For a job that pays what?
One need not wonder why airline managements continue to rein in on T&C every cycle, when they have already managed to convince every wannabee pilot in the world that for a king's ransom they are "qualified" to work there.
When I was a Captain on the 737-300/500, I hopped on a BA aircraft from LHR to MAN. At the end of the flight I stopped up to say hello to the crew and had a chat about life at BA (this is about 7 years ago). FO said he was still paying off his training costs, which sounded astronomical to me, and that he needed a partner (who was ALSO a BA 737 EFIS F/O) to enable him to afford rent in Brighton, where he lived. I was astounded.
We have debased the profession by constantly touting "I would do it for nothing," and it is slowly but surely getting closer and closer to happening. Now, please do not get me wrong. I do not begrudge the 20 year old posters from getting a job in aviation. However, the willingness to pay whatever it costs to get the job, and do whatever it takes to keep it, has provided management with more leverage than they could have dreamed of a decade or two ago.
We are on the brink of making the airline industry almost exclusively a single, young person's job, where prehire "experience" is an MPL, hundreds of hours of MS Flight Simulator time and the willingness to accept poverty level wages for responsibilities almost unmatched in society. Benefits will be a thing of the past and pilots will be "guns for hire" to the highest (of the lowest) bidders. Somewhere, somehow, a floor will be set and then, without anyone realizing it was possible, it will be lowered once more as another "fourth world" aviation mecca produces MPL "pilots" even cheaper, and brings people into the industry expecting even less....because that is what they were used to in their home country.
Marriage will be out of the question, because no self-respecting spouse would want to go through the constant upheavals and dirt poor living standards required to "live the dream" of aviation. In short, we will all become the proverbial lav truck driver, who, while visting his doctor, was told "If you want to stop your hands from cracking and peeling and being blue all the time from the harsh honeybee chemicals, you will have to quit your job," replied with "What? And get out of aviation?!"
As a middle aged Captain, typed on the 737, 757, 767, and A320 family, plus a few thousands cycles in a 727, when I look back at who is chasing my job, I shudder to think what is coming up, and what WE ALL are allowing to happen to this profession in the name of the global free market (which is a COMPLETE ILLUSION, especially in such a government controlled industry as this!).
We need to check the mirror and our six, and try and MENTOR some of the people who are in such a rush to the top. Recycling one's "career" every few years is the path to loneliness, sorrow and misery. Being able to join a company that values it's employees, requires more than the minimum qualifications to ensure the highest standards, and rewards those standards with commensurate T&C, enables a person to have a family, live in a decent house and raise that family with a spouse that does not have to check your ID every time you come home just to be sure. Is that too much to ask OF OURSELVES, that we insist on such standards? I certainly hope not.