J and FA, I'm afraid everything I have said is absolutely true. J, it's very easy to take the moral high ground from the comfort of your bedroom in your mum and dad's house. FA, as far as I can recall from your other posts, you are not yet qualified, right? Well, until you actually have to confront the jobs market directly you are somewhat insulated from it's realities, comforted by optimism and noble thoughts of boycotts and suchlike.
I however was in a position where I had to play the cards I had been dealt. Degrade the industry? Not really. I didn't cause the current world recession - I just have to deal with the consequences and take the industry as I found it. The jobs market isn't screwed becaused I paid for a type rating - more the other way round. It is simply supply and demand; the ugly face of free market economy. My type rating had a dead cert job with a successful and stable airline at the other end of it and to be fair people have been paying for type ratings for decades, albeit through bonding agreements.
I left the RAF with a four figure number of flying hours. In the 9 months from civil licence issue to starting my type rating I had one serious interview (with the airline I know work for), an interview with a charitable flying organization which would have required me to raise my own salary by personally approaching people for donations and a tentative offer of a couple of months unpaid bush flying in Africa - great but not a career move. In the meantime I worked in a coffee shop for £5.80 per hour aware that skill fade was setting in, my experience was getting more distant and newer more freshly qualified people were entering the jobs market all the time. So I considered the risk, made an investment in my own future and accepted the airline job offer which would simply have been offered to someone else if I had declined it. I am an adult with a mortgage to pay, a relationship to support and a life to be getting on with. It's all very well holding the moral high ground as your house gets repossessed and you sit in the dole queue becoming increasingly unemployable.
For me things are working out well and the figure I gave is correct (although as I said above the average that I expect). This 'reverse-bonding' (whereby I pay up front for the rating but my costs are returned through a good salary) was the only reasonable choice for me in the cuurent market. I wouldn't touch a private, speculative type rating with a sh1tty stick and as for pay-to-line-train, well, you'd have to be so crazy that you shouldn't hold a medical.
Now if I, as an ex-RAF pilot, had this much trouble in the current jobs market, how do you thing 200hr ab-initios are getting on? Maybe some of you wannabes should consider your own intentions before slinging mud.
ps FA, Captains in my airline do very well indeed, and I never said jets. i flew multi-crew, twin-turbine, heavy helicopters.