Thats a pretty fair summary Superpilot.
Flyingpicket
I promise I'm not out to offend you or anyone else personally.
You are right, maybe my description of OAT cadets was a bit harsh and a bit unproffesional. It's not hard to get wound up easily reading posts on this site sometimes!
To re-iterate my point which Superpilot has just summarised, my main personal concern is that in most other professional industries you work your way through from junior positions learning the trade right up through senior and management etc. In the military, everyone starts as a private or a JT and works their way through sergeant, warrant officer etc based on time served, suitablility and merit. Doctors for example dont go straight from medical school into specialist areas of brain surgery.
It is not yours, or any other pilots fault that this structure has collapsed in aviation because of the way the system allows people to buy in. If a junior doctor had the option to pay to bypass all of the years working nights in an A&E for low money and go straight in as a surgeon I bet they would do. The difference is their proffessional bodies would never ever allow it to happen whereas ours has.
It's almost a certainty that you will have to buy a type rating these days and we've all weighed up the economics of cost vs job and salary prospects at some time. Eight years ago the B737 was the hot type to get with the best chances of a job, currently it's the A320.
I think that given your options you were right to go the way you did and whereas a couple of years ago that would have probably got you home and dry with a permanent easy contract it now seems that things have deteriorated even further?
In my experience guys like you are not deliberately looking to buy their way to the top. You would probably much rather have got a straight job with a turboprop operator, put in a few years and got some good experience then moved onto a bigger jet. The problem is those jobs arent there to be had anymore because the guys that have them (like myself) can't make the next move. The big loco airlines are the ones messing things up by dangling the carrot directly in front of guys like you. As I said previously though, they are bound to do it because it saves them a fortune and gives them flexibility. They shouldn't be allowed to do it that's the point.
We all get on here, get wound up and bicker and fight amongst ourselves but really when you weigh it all up the existance of this current system has screwed us both, and many many others.
On the plus side you've got arguably the best type on your licence and you have some hours on type so all you can really do is take the Berlin gig and hope to get back to into easy next spring. In the longer term all any of us can hope for is that something transpires to put right this corrupt system.
As far as your other comment goes, I've been in this industry long enough to remember when Oxford produced pilots of a high standard and, although I can't openly discuss how, I have had extensive involvement working with easyJet, CTC and Oxford and I assure you that the standards of airmanship, accademic ability and even just plain old common sense, are not what they used to be in the current crop, yet even so the door remains wide open all the time the money keeps flowing.
Regardless, I do accept that a couple of my comments were written in anger and it is unfair to make assumptions and tar everybody with the same brush.
As you rightly picked up, I am only trying to make a positive contribution to your thread not just toss in hand grenades for the sake of it!!
Hope it works out for you and all of us.