The real question is, what the hell has BALPA been doing the last 10 years (a decade that mysteriously coincided with virtually nil recruitment from the almighty BA) while every other airline in the country was instigating insidious recruitment practices, pay-for-type-rating, pay-to-fly and all other kinds of general exploitative shaftings, and generally doing everything in their power to get young wannabes to pay massively inflated prices for costs that were always previously borne by the airlines?
So now BA finally decides to recruit ab initio again, and after a decade of utter silence BALPA promptly issues some pompous and self-congratulatory statement which contains little more than vague waffle about how the industry is "waking up to this issue" and a couple of outfits are "making commitments to look at stuff".
Where were you during the last decade when virtually every decent charter outfit dropped their bonds in favour of charging for type ratings? When Ryan started outrageous nonsense like charging £50 for applications and £150 for job interviews? When Easy first of all dropped their bonding arrangement for the much reviled TRSS, and then a couple of years after that dropped TRSS also once they realized they could actually get kids to fly their planes for effectively a grand a month on casual contracts, courtesy of
ing CTC Wings?
And now we have a situation where virtually every trainee in the land budgets an extra £25,000 for an exorbitantly overpriced type rating and £25,000 more for 500 hours "line training" as part of their ab initio skills? And every last remaining experienced turboprop and regional-jet skipper in the country, who once had aspirations to get onto boeing or airbus, finds themself trapped because they aren't already type rated on big gear.
And now BA have resurrected the cadet scheme, but this time they're making the kids sign up for £84,000 plus interest as the price of admission, and all the guys at BALPA HQ can do, is issue a bloody great headline stating it's a "move in the right direction" ??
And before anyone has a go at me about BALPA only being as strong as the will of its' members ... I paid my dues to that organization every day I was employed by a UK airline (now in the contract world) and I would gladly have taken part in any action against this massive forced robbery of trainee pilots and scramble by the airlines to outsource every possible cost of recruitment onto them at massively inflated prices. However there was absolutely no direction or comment forthcoming from BALPA about stuff affecting the training market, all those years. Now the horse has well and truly bolted but as long BA weren't mixed up in it, I guess it wasn't worth making comment on previously huh.
