@planedrive
OK that's interesting as I have conflicting information. I understand that Thomson are in fact going to recruit their cadets from inside the company. They have plenty of fATPL guys working as cabin crew and in their offices to more than cover their intake requirement.
As for BA Cityflyer there has been a rumour that some cadets were taken for their "hold pool". Nobody has been able to substantiate these claims however my friend who works at FTE says that is not the case as far as he knows, certainly not from CTC anyhow.
That leaves easyJet which at first instance sounds good however they are in the process of their largest experienced pilot recruitment campaign and as far as I understand there are no shortage of takers. This seriously limits the amount of places for future CTC guys as eJ will surely continue hiring experienced guys when they can get them for the price of cadets.
As for guys who haven't finished yet being given their TR dates already I'm trying desperately to get hold of another friend of mine that has been in the pool for a couple of months now and didn't have his date when we chatted on Tuesday so sounds a bit fishy to me.
As far as I know there haven't been any recent guys go through the system for flybe and Monarch only took a few anyhow. Also I understood that the main flow of BAFPP guys will finish late this year, early next but again this is only a few a month. Don't forget the BAFPP program was almost instantly cut short after it was released due to the BMI merger and although a CTC company manages them they are still split across 3 schools not just CTC watering the numbers down yet again.
As for your questions:
1. CTC has been trying to double the intake for over a year now but weren't able to because of the bottleneck in NZ. If the courses are now much larger I would like to believe this problem has been resolved. I would be cautious of believing this is due to eJ, its more to do with new owners looking for a nice ROI.
2. Interesting rumour, last time I looked into their Qatar relationship the first 20 guys that were sent out there last year were still not flying as they didn't have the training capacity for cadets available. This may have changed now and I will check into that but I've heard nothing different so far.
@Vipersrt10
Re Qatar, I assume you are referring to the new CTC MPL program with your numbers and therefore they refer to uptake and not placement (see my previous paragraph)?