I've always thought of the whole bond thing as neither here nor there on it's own, provided one's in it with BA for the long haul (no pun intended).
It all depends on one's financial aims and how far up the priorities post-training salary is to the individual. Where it's a biggie, then it requires a holistic comparison with the alternatives at one's disposal (aviation and non-aviation) over a period of a number of years including those after training. This would factor in FPP vs DEP salary, bearing in mind that to be DEP one would have had to fund the training somehow anyway.
It has been made apparent severally that at the onset the FPP salary scale is significantly below that of DEP, but I don't know if the two can really be compared, as it is unlikely one can be a direct entry into BA straight after training. If they were comparable, then it could be argued that BA is not really paying back the bond, but just structuring your wages in a more tax efficient way. Similar can be argued to the days when training was "fully sponsored" that it was just subsidised by a lower wage at the onset of working on the line. The key would be how much BA saves and what your take home pay is. If it's good on both sides, then I think they call that a win-win
For myself I would grab the first opportunity to work for BA either way. Flying is by far not the most financially prudent decision for me as for many others and I don't even need to go into into an in depth analysis to know that my financial standing over the remainder of my working life is at a great detriment going into flying than if I were to remain within my current realm. The bottomline is we're not going into it for the bottomline. Something I tried to subtly put across in my interview, but may have been misconstrued.
I paraphrased some of the some points as Mayday, which I hadn't seen on my initial reply
Last edited by my_call; 23rd Apr 2013 at 12:54.