Lack of simulator availability especially on the Q400. There's only one sim with about 350 or so pilots doing FOUR cyclics per year
. The classic isn't as bad but now that the Q400 stable nears 30 airframes (to be finalised at 32 by mid next year?) it's becoming a little problematic. Coupled with (rather) frequent break downs of the blasted thing just compounds the issue.
I notice on the Joining QLink thread that newbies are saying the sky is falling - hardly the case.
Ground schools are numbering 10-16 new crew every six weeks. At the moment we've got a whole bunch of FOs sitting on training reserve for around 3-5 months on full salary doing nothing. Makes pretty bad business sense to continue to outlay that sort of expenditure (but then again the Group hasn't entirely been ingenious in that department either). So the training has been put on hiatus until this new glut has been cleared.
Management have also stated that they will be restructuring to a twice yearly sim system with the Q400 sims in Seattle and Toronto being utilised again to handle the back log until a more permanent solution has been found.
Fuel-Off
