Barriers to entry
If this has been said, apologies.
There has always been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future a great pool of young men and women who aspire to be pilots both military and civil. Their talents will very and also their social circumstances and ability to pay.
In today's low cost airline environment, all airlines are reducing Ts & Cs and the low cost guys have led the way. There isn't enough profit in these fares to pay us well, you can't be paid at Flybe what you can at Thomson. Any individual line pilot can easily be lost to the company and there is no material detriment to the business. This isn't so in a law firm / brokerage / private clinic. Those guys trade on reputation, we are anonymous operational staff. We are not professionals in the old sense, our job is too modern for that and we don't therefore have any decent ties to government to help us defend the industry.
Whilst we all know that a good Captain runs a safe and economical operation, the managers don't see this detail and in any case calculate that a much lower total pilot budget is in the best interests of the company and any individual managers bonus. Take the keys, bring it back in one piece, minimum standard, low cost. The engineers have saved us all from being tested except on the rarest of occasions, and that has meant ever decreasing standards and less able pilots doing an acceptable job (in financial terms). I do believe that we are heading for an accident or two in low cost in Europe, but such is the low probability of that, it could be tomorrow or in 10 yrs time.
Our only defense as I see it, and which BALPA, has worked little on is to stop the lowering of barriers to entry.
CTC / Oxfordnow select mainly on ability to pay. I recently spoke to a cabin crew member who failed the selection at CTC but was going back in 6 weeks to resit that portion. In the past people were not invited back for years.
Every person undertaking ATPL exams is cheating. All the schools have almost every question available, the quality of so called feedback is almost perfect. It cannot have been gained through feedback of remembered questions but only through wholesale copy. It is a gross dereliction of duty for the licensing authorities not to prevent this and uphold the standards of their exams.
With the MPPL the difficult initial IR test has been done away with.
A parents ability to pay is not sufficient grounds to entrust passengers to their spawn.
Trainers at easyJet are now complaining of attitude and ability problems with Cadets.
If the pilot workforce fails to raise barriers to entry we will continue the downward trend as airlines seek to fill the RHS as cheaply as possible, leaving the question of finding suitable captains till a later date and a different manager.
BALPA has failed.
To ensure the safe conduct of European passenger flights we must raise barriers to entry and awareness by:
Demanding stringent testing of potential pilots, academic and practical.
Raising awareness amongst parents of potential pilots of conditions and prospects
Raising awareness amongst the travelling public of who is flying them, how much training they have had, their lifestyle in terms of pay, debt, work and rest.
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---apologies for any iPad induced typographic errors