Maybe it's just me being a miserable bastard, but I've been increasingly concerned lately at the incredible levels of optimism of a lot of people here who are about to get into training and all the incessant chatter about "where should I train to have the best chance of a job as soon as I graduate?". Just looking at that other thread of foghorn's about the BALPA conference, and it appears to me that quite a few people are showing an extreme reluctance to accept the fact that there will be SOD ALL chance of a newbie getting a job in 12 or even 24 months time, no matter WHERE you learned to fly.
You lot who are looking to get into training right now, well I would never say don't do it, but I really feel you should be asking yourselves some hard questions, not along the lines of
'where should I train to maximise my extremely remote chance of getting a right hand seat in 2003', but rather
'how can I start my training now and ensure that I can still be employable in 2006 -7 should it be necessary'.
The truth is that, depending on how things go with George Dubbya, it could be quite late in this decade before the next hiring boom, and by that stage 'where you trained' isn't going to come into it if you learned to fly back in good old 2002.
The trouble is in this current situation, with no one being quite sure when hiring will resume is that it's all about currency, especially if you're a low timer trying to get airline jobs. If you only have 250 hours to start with and you haven't flown for 2 or 3 years, then it doesn't matter where you trained you're not going to look that attractive to the airlines. Obviously people who have a few thousand hours, especially if it's IFR multi engine hours, can afford to go uncurrent a bit longer without their entire skills base going down the pan.
Now it seems to me that you could go and blow off 60,000 quid on an integrated course now, The USA could kick off the next world war and all of a sudden we're looking at another 3 or 4 years of no airline hiring (and you having more or less forgotten how to fly by the end of it).
Or, you could go spend your 35 or 40 grand on the modular thing and then allow in your budget to spend 2 or 3 or even 5 grand a year keeping everything current and gradually improving your skills.
Sure, it might not even be necessary ... but then again it might. I have at least a couple of my former students who graduated last year who are pretty much at their wits end, one of them is about to quit his flying instructor job because he can no longer service his massive career development loan on flying instructor wages, the other one is working and can't afford to keep current, I can see them both rapidly losing their flying skills and becoming unemployable unless something spectacular happens in the hiring market VERY soon ... and we all know that it's not going to
Sorry for being so negative but I am just trying to inject a bit of reality into the situation, when I log onto this board and I still see people happily talking away about spending huge sums of money on flight training because of the 'retirement bulge' or god help us 'the predicted pilot shortage'
as though nothing's happened in the last 12 months, I really start to worry.