It is difficult to believe that porridge and I work at the same school, so different is his view from mine. Whilst I recognise the period he describes when many of the most highly qualified and experienced instructors voted with their feet against the incompetent management then in place, I do not recognise the present day nirvana that he describes.
The cold reality of today is that those few remaining instructors of any worth are steadily being marginalised and, in some cases, dismissed as BBA move to an even more profit driven culture. We, the real line instructors, have been told, in no uncertain terms, that the thrust of the company is now totally commercial - the student, it seems, is to become simply a source of revenue to be discarded once bled dry. Promotion within the school now depends not upon instructional ability but upon 'management' ability. It has to be said that BBA's perception of management ability seems to be at odds with that of most of the flight training industry in depending, almost exclusively, upon the brownness of ones nose (or any other part of the anatomy, I suppose).
Even the relatively new, and almost universally unrecognised, Head of Training is to be sidelined according to the latest management missive. The Flight Managers (CFI's) are, we understand, now going to by-pass the HT and report directly to the grandly named, and exclusively commercially orientated, General Manager Integrated Flight Training (who he - Ed??).
Couple this profit driven organisation with the fact that there is more guaranteed profit in airline sponsored training than there will ever be in self-sponsored training and then choose whether or not to believe the pseudo-management yuckspeak peddled by porridge.
Incidentally, whilst it is true that porridge is not (yet) "a managerial/marketing hack at OATS producing yet more spin", many of us are resigned to the unpalatable fact that it is only a matter of time...........Beware!!