I wonder if jetstar will be advising passengers before boarding of the limited experience of the crew for their flight.
People don't give a rats @rse when they're paying $1 AUD to be there. And their logic is that the pilots are all trained to a minimum regulatory standard, which they are.
I believe DEFOs will ALWAYS be there. Going by the Easy/CTC experience, they still have DEFOs and have always since the start of their cadet scheme.
It would be unwise to take 100% of your workforce intake from cadets, for one, the training requirements to train all your new pilots as cadets would be beyond most airlines and two, it would result in a nasty hump where by a large proportion of your workforce would all have the same low experience at the same time with no experienced pilots to fall back on.
I can see G.A picking up their conditions, people there staying longer, then after a fairly long stint at a good G.A company (future tense) finally heading off to DEFO...
I just love it how there is a growing number of people out there that think that they'll go through the cadet scheme and get a easy command in 5-6 years. I can't think of any of the cadets I trained 5 years ago at Easyjet/CTC that have commands.
ICAO standards that most countries have adopted, state that 1500 hrs total time is required for the issue of an ATPL. And of those hours,
Co-pilot time only counts as half. So to obtain your ATPL from scratch, you will require 3000 hrs co-pilot time, as you'll only have your bare minimum command time of 150-200 hrs. And incase you haven't done your research, you need an ATPL to command an aircraft heavier than 5700 kg. Most LCC work their crew about 850-900 hrs a year.. hitting the 1000 if your really unlucky....
Factor in DEFOs that will still be around, DE Captains, which Jetstar clearly state on their website, that they will take if no suitable internal candidates are around, I think time to command from cadet to capt would be somewhere in the region of 10 years. Which personally I don't think is a bad thing.
The real interesting statistics will be impact on the accident/incident rates and what type of accidents/incidents may occur due to a shift to a cadetship scheme...