it's something I've never been able to understand either - a lot of the self sponsored people have been thru exactly the same training as the sponsored cadets, same a/c etc to get a frozen atpl , so apparently saving the airline the cost of funding the licence as well as the risk of flunking.
yet they don't want to know, until the situation gets dire and then there's a knee jerk reaction.
i started a thread on this some time ago which you might like to read....
http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthr...threadid=65068
laters