This is an economic crisis like no other in the last 70 years. UK is perhaps the worst prepared "developed" economy to meet it. Likely we will see a desperate second leg of the downturn next year for reasons well documented elsewhere. We are really up the creek, with the prospect of a sterling crisis looming ever larger. One failed gilt auction will be all it takes to see the UK shown for the basket case it is. In a market like this, it pains me to say it, any job is a job. Frankly, I dont know why airlines are not ripping up pilot contracts and saying £25k for an FO, £40K for a captain and that's it. I suspect that next year, they will or its a collapse all round as demand evaporates in the face of persistent, deep-rooted, long term unemployment, a need to pay for oil in a third world currency as the pound sinks further, and as various taxes both overt and covert whoever wins the election sap what disposable income there is. We face a national debt on a par with that at the end of WW2, scaled up to todays money, and bugger-all economic growth to pay it back with. UK is going back to the 70's at a searing pace. The next ten years will be absolutely brutal. In my opinion, we all know who we have to thank for that.
APD is a disgrace too, in as much as the rest of Europe does not pay it so we are further hobbling an already crippled UK market for airline travel.
As to our profession, well I had a great time but its finished, really finished. I derive no joy from saying that. A friend of mine told me about a dinner he went to where there was an advisor in economics to the "brightly coloured" airline board, (a social accident - he did not know him before or fix it up, his friends he went with did). He told me that this guy was fascinating. His contempt for pilots knew no bounds and he expounded gleefully on the summer-only contracts he forsaw and the increasing contractorisation of piloting overall, where contractors bid for the work the brand generated and the lowest cost base won. He looked whistfully at Eastern Europe as a great source of cheap pilots and said supply easily exceeded demand for the forseeable future. His view was that flying an airliner was a slightly more sophisticated train driver style job and said, bluntly, that some train drivers now earned more than pilots, which was as it should be in his view, especially for FO's who he viewed as a legal requirement but otherwise woefully overpaid for their contribution. This, he predicted would change rapidly and so, it seems, is the case at the brightly coloured airline, as elsewhere.
He admitted, apparently, that airlines were a pretty cosy club through the various trade bodies they belong to and that they all got together to discuss areas of mutual interest like overhead - particularly staff costs. The oil price makes an airline a price taker but salaries are where they can be a price maker, he said, and that they were all determined to drive the status and salaries of piloting through the floor. It was, he felt, a ridiclous "career" to enter as the specialisation was so narrow and the industry itself so vulnerable to external shocks that it was virtually to condemn oneself to a job where opportunities were increasingly limited and salaries shrinking in real terms every year and with little chance to move outside it at a corporate level unless to manage within it, where the focus would inevitably be on who could deliver the cheapest cost base given the total commoditisation of the industry product. That meant being the best at screwing down the earnings of your own peer group. He felt that this was all fair game and that the market was so easy to rig against pilots come any sign of a downturn in the economy that becoming one was the height of folly, but that, never-the-less, plenty of people kept applying so there was little need to adjust the career to attract the best, they would take what they got. Safety cut little ice because, as he put it, "you lot all want to get home to your families at the end of your overpaid day, so the passengers will be fine too."
Personally, I would have wanted to either walk out or punch him on the nose, but my mate stayed, gripped by the depth of the exposition this economics expert who sat on many other boards of other industries as well went on to over the course of their evening.
Much of what he apparently said has come to pass - Brookfield contract pilots dominate the new entries to R*an A*r, and the FO's at the brightly coloured airline are getting ever more put upon. The economy refuses to re-ignite in the UK in a meaningful way and the clouds are looming.
It seems to me that people need to have back-up plan in this industry, both in terms of what to do if their airline or career come to a halt, and indeed of where to live if the UK becomes as gritty as it is destined to without the utmost care and skill from its economic managers in the next decade. (See much chance of that? Me neither!).
Astreus are somehow providing growth in an economy that is still shrinking. I suspect, although I hate to say it, that their offer will seem quite generous in the years to come.