I am appalled by all this. False hopes of a job, fake interviews and £290 for a ten minute experience in the helicopter. Unbelievable.
When you read back a few pages of this thread, you'll see an admission by 'jerrysenior' that he set up Austin Aviation. To claim they are a 3rd party company can be seen as fraud.
I think this is preying on desperate people, like so-called modelling agencies that promise the earth to young aspiring women with false hope of a modelling contract, as long as they pay a few hundred quid for some photos, also by some '3rd party' studio (which is owned and run by the agency).
To make this legit, it appears a young guy has been employed and will be trained up, and the cost is being met by the hundreds of wannabees who fork out £290 for a ten minute flight and made to go through a series of interviews and assessments to keep up the pretense of it being a 'job interview'
Great business model.
Immoral?? Unethical?? Illegal?? You decide.
I have a question - when you did your flight, which seat were you in? Were you in the right seat during this flight? Being in the 'correct' seat is important.
If you feel aggrieved by all this, then I suggest you contact the newspaper to make them aware of the false job advert and your local councils trading standard department. Perhaps the airfield management office would also like to know what's been going on under their noses.
There are lots of rules and regulations in flight training, both on the flight school and the airfield. Maybe some of these rules and regs are being broken? Austin Aviation piggybacks on another flight schools TRTO - maybe they should be informed about all this too?
Who do you know who can help you??
As for signing a disclaimer before you went for the briefing and test flight is a clear indication that they are covering their arses. If this was legitimate, no such paperwork would need to be signed!
In any walk of life, there will be those minority who set up schemes and scams and make a lot of money from naive and gullible people, classic schemes such as false modelling agencies charging young women for photos on false promises of getting modelling work will always be around.... doing this to wannabe helicopter pilots and charging almost £300 for a totally made-up "flight assessment test" is a new one on me.
I am shaking my head in disbelief.
This can't be good for our industry. We don't want helicopter pilot training to be viewed with the same kind of suspicion as we get when we receive emails from Nigerian businessmen who want to deposit £10,000,000 in our bank accounts. The longer this scheme is allowed to operate, the more it will tarnish the entire helicopter training industry.