Hello DW499 you old goat,
On the note of his post does anyone know the rough stats on the percentages of pilots that were initially sponsored? How do the majority of pilots fund their commercial training? I have heard of a lot of pilots that realised when they were in their mid 30's that it's what they wanted to do and so they took the money out of their mortgage. I mean, how many pilots fresh out of education fund their own commercial training and how do they do it? An obvious answer is to get a family member to secure the loan for them, but is there any other way?
I too have failed a couple of sponsorship applications. The impression I currently have is that the sponsorship drought that occured after 9/11 is going to leave every single sponsored course swamped for the forseeable future. There just seems to be such a huge amount of people searching out sponsorship. I basically fell like a lottery ball being tossed about inside a big machine.
Any job that I apply for in the mean time between sponsorship applications will be merely be a stop gap. I could be floating around from job to job for the next 7 years until I am too old to get sponsored, then I will have achieved nothing. I want to get a job that I could get stuck into in the mean time, but there's simply nothing else that interests me.
What a situation.
PT