It’s truly refreshing to see that pilot recruitment is an ops dept function, the downside of this is that ops is a very busy department with a finite amount of resources and time to dedicate to recruitment so they cannot possibly deal with applicant numbers in high three figures or maybe four figures. The easiest way to reduce applicant numbers and to make the workload manageable for a busy department is to have very stringent application requirements, even if in the process they miss out on some decent applicants.
It seems bizarre that a company that is willing to finance an expensive type rating is going to quibble about a relatively inexpensive JOC.
They could of course offer non JOC holders employment with the caveat that they have to complete a JOC before starting type rating, as even the longest JOCs only take 10 days to complete and it is possible to get a JOC done in one day (morning in the classroom and afternoon in the sim).
As already has been written, it’s their trainset and they set the requirements.
CGWhitemonk has asked how many places will be taken by the big three integrated schools, personally I’d be more interested to see how many are internal recruits from CPL/ MEIR holders currently working for Flybe in other areas (ops, despatch, cabin crew, engineering etc). I know in the past Flybe have recruited low hours pilots internally, it’d be interesting to see if they do so this time around.
Good luck to all those that apply.