I've spent the past two years trying to work out when would be a good time to jump in to Integrated training. I finally took severance from a well paid job at the end of September and am trying to eliminate the flying school hype from the cool analysis required of whether now is the time.
I've hesitated not because of a lack of passion for aviation but because frankly if you study medicine for example you have a 90% chance of getting a job but pilot training isn't like that. I know it's deeply cyclical and wildly unpredictable but if I knew how many were getting jobs now and had a feel for future intention of airlines I could judge whether I'm prepared to gamble on odds of say 50/50.
The flying schools I speak to are all keen to point out that there are signs of the market picking up but I need hard facts.
Would recent Grads of OATS, CABAIR, JEREZ etc care to comment on the number of people on their a course who have obtained a flying job at the end of it. If what the schools are saying is true then I would expect to see say 50% of those Graduating this month with interviews or job offers lined up as opposed to 30% in say November.
What % of Graduates from the leading schools are getting flying jobs within say 6 months? I have no idea whether it's 60-70% or 10%. Such information would greatly assist in deciding whether or not to commit.
Does anyone have a view on the trends within the industry - can we realistically expect things to get better late in 2003?
I have a wife to think of and this is an awful lot of money. She's 100% behind me and this is all I have ever wanted to do. I have frankly spent 2 years trying to talk myself out of it but aviation just will not go away and there's a limit to how many Discovery Wings programmes a man can watch!
If you'd rather email offline I'm on
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I'm grateful for your input.
Desk-pilot