Can’t help but recall my mate who met a Greek economics advisor to the easyjet board. The incredulity on his face as he told me of the contempt this guy had for pilots was a picture. Apparently, this advisors' view was that before long it will be possible for easy and ryan to employ former Soviet Bloc pilots on a kind of commuting contract at "a fraction" of current wages and conditions. They would be on totally flexible terms and used and dropped as necessary. They would also serve to, if I quote my mate correctly in recounting what he heard this guy say, serve to "keep the few wretched Europeans we have to employ as trainers and so on honest by holding down their wages".
Don’t count on the supine CAA to help here - their goal is the keep the air travel market "dynamic", (read as low a cost to the public as conceivable), and the 'regulation', such as it is, is increasingly devolved to the airline itself for self-audit. Likewise BALPA - there is absolutely no public understanding of the contribution a secure, stable, professionally remunerated pilot workforce make to the safety and efficiency of an airline and I doubt they can halt the slide either.
It took the Bader Commission that stopped the abuse of pilots flying hours for there to be a change in that area with the introduction of Flight Time Limitations, (themselves now used as a target, not an absolute limit as previously intended), and the Commission itself was prompted by a string of accidents. I am appalled to say it, but until the same happens and it is attributable to the degradation of skills and stability in the flightdeck then nothing but nothing will halt the slide. This industry will go the way of the UK Merchant Fleet: totally off-shored.
The only other thing that may stop it is the insurance industry that is asked to underwrite this circus. In the merchant fleet they have now pretty much refused to insure, for example, single hulled oil tankers. The risk is too great. Likewise, BP who off-shored all their merchant crewing, went back to a UK crew and its own nautical training college, I believe I am right in saying, because the risk was deemed to great otherwise and insurance rates demanded it.
That alone, cold hard cash, will change this but, as the merchant fleet found, not before many ships had foundered or been sunk and crews lives lost with environmental catastrophe caused.
Regulation might too, but show me a single MP who knows anything of worth about the civil airline sector, let alone a journalist in the mainstream press, (99% sensationalist B*st*rds when it comes to airline reporting).
It’s a sad, sad situation. Would be CTC cadets take note before you burn your or your parent’s hard-earned cash.