Stella Arrival
Your penultimate sentence is a very important one:
If flying aeroplanes is what you really want to do then good luck to you, but make sure that you are really certain because the industry is generally insecure, difficult to get into, easy to be pushed out of, riddled with people who hide behind seniority lists and convince themselves they are something special.
Maybe age is making me more cynical, but once you have spent your large wad of cash and got your shiney new CPL/IR (fATPL) what next? Once you have spent a couple of hundred pounds on mailing every airline in europe and had 3 replies to your mailshot of over 150, you will start to feel a little more jaded, possibly even bitter and twisted.
It is easy to be blinkered into thinking that BA and the RAF are the only ways into flying, but only a tiny tiny minority of those who apply are ever going to make into a flying job through that route. The easyJet JMC CTC schemes are currently the only full sponsorships available, but again there will only be a very small number who be awarded those sponsorships.
CTC, you have to love them really, they were at least partly responsible for making sure we all had to have MCC courses bought privately rather than provided by an employer, then they raised the financial bar with thier AQC, and now they have a new product to sell. Hmmmmm.....the cynic in me again.
Johnny7, there have been other posts/threads about the number of CPL/IR issues, and from I can remember there has indeed been a drop in the number of licences issued recently.
In the two years March 2000 - March 2002 the CAA issued 300 IRs to CPL(A) holders. That's 150 per year.
All through the late nineties, the CAA was issuing 400 IRs per year, year in year out.
This from the CAA's own published licensing statistics.
Even up to 10/09/2001 it was difficult going trying to get a job in aviation. The period 1999-2001 is now being regarded as a "good time" for hiring, and even then there was a relatively large number of experienced Kiwi's Ozmates and Seff Effrikans coming into the UK to take up jobs with the Lo-Co's. It was still hard then, and now we are saying these are gloomy times - but the truth be known it has always been tough.
I think the change to the JAA Modular system has and will continue to make it too expensive for many. There are some that say that it is now cheaper to do an integrated course than it was in the 1990's yadda yadda yadda, but Christ Almighty, 60k is still 60k. It is a shedload of money to gamble on a dream.
Now we have airlines that are making huge profits, no mean feat in the aviation industry, asking us to foot
their training bill.
I am not trying to put anyone off a career in aviation, but people should be aware of what it is like before they get into it.