stevelup
I think you're deliberately missing the point made by BA's recruitment manager and it has nothing to do with the AF accident.
The courses offered by CTC (and the like) are geared towards producing airline pilots for the future and in a relatively short time. A student arriving with, say, 400 hours in a Cessna 150 will potentially need to un-learn his single pilot operation in order to fit with the multi-crew training they offer. Many of his fellow students will not have flown before and thus will start from scratch as a team member.
The advice to Tom stands - get a PPL, enjoy it but don't build hours for the sake of it...