What if the person paying to fly is also an extremely talented and competent pilot? They way this sounds is if you pay, you're automatically not as good as someone who can't pay and you are a bad person because you are stopping them getting a chance to fly?
Are you then saying ALL p2f guys are bad pilots and the thorn in the side is that all the competent safe pilots can't afford to p2f and so every airline flying with p2f cadets is risking its safety?
I do agree that it leads to a shift in the way selection goes in the sense that it excludes those who can't afford it, but if you can't fly, you won't pass your type rating, and if you're THAT bad you probably would never have passed your IR, it is after all the hardest civilian flight test in the world, at least the UK one is anyway.
There is a great danger of blanketing an issue here, there is good and bad with every scheme. But no scheme is ALL bad, if it were, then every single time a p2f guy took off in an aeroplane there would be an accident/incident. However this isn't the case. And accidents in aviation come down normally as a chain of errors, it is unfair to say, the reason that airbus had a tailstrike is because the first officer paid to fly it.
A fully sponsored cadet could still make the same mistake.
It is unreasonable and unprofessional to pin the blame on one sole factor.
What about when airlines stopped sponsoring pilots and people had to pay for their ab initio training i.e PPL to CPL+IR + MCC, are you telling me that all those that could afford to pay took the chances away from those that couldn't?
Yes it meant that some potentially brilliant pilots couldn't ever realise their dream because of the financial barriers, and those that had the means would be able to succeed. That became a selection in itself.
But Aspiring pilots didn't kick up a stink and b*tch and moan about it and boycott flight training until the full sponsorship programmes were re-instated.
The fact that you had to pay for your training also did not mean that Safety in aviation was compromised because everyone was now p2f.
You can train people to be safe pilots, regardless of how they end up in the flight deck. It's a state of mind.