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Old 3rd Feb 2014, 10:44
  #89 (permalink)  
Horatio Leafblower
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: NSW Australia
Posts: 2,451
Received 29 Likes on 13 Posts
Is the job market (RIGHT NOW) overflowing with unemployed junior pilots or does a new pilot have a fairly decent chance of getting into the airlines?
Rookie it's not the job market RIGHT NOW that counts.

Start training today and it will probably be 18 months before you are qualified for your first job. Please be aware that you aren't ready for the cockpit of an airliner just yet.

Assuming you have been lucky, you might have your first job ($25-30k as a casual) as a very junior pilot or a junior instructor within 6 months of graduation.

You should expect 5-7 years clawing your way up the ladder, only leaving each job as a better job is offered (and occasionally getting retrenched) before you could reasonably expect to be in a small airliner.

Although you might technically meet an airline's minimum experience requirements within a couple of years, the plum jobs will often go to the candidate with far more than the minimums - like any career, to the best candidate available.

You might do it in less - and then again you might never make it at all.

Your intelligence, your people skills, your integrity and your determination will have a major influence on your quest to become an airline pilot. If you don't fit the defined mold you won't get into that airline - but that doesn't mean you can't have a fulfilling career as a pilot in one of many other streams.

Like many others I set off down this road with Qantas as the only possible objective. I was in an interview/Sim-ride assessment group in May 2008 with 4 others, all of whom were jet pilots for other airlines. I was scrubbed but the other 4 made it, only to be scrubbed when the GFC hit in October/November of that year.

To the best of my knowledge Qantas has not hired a single new pilot "Off the street" since.

I will echo the words of The Green Goblin - if you don't have the fire burning inside you, then you will end up either a) very lucky and in an airline or b) bitter and twisted and $80k poorer.
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