Mick,
Please don't take this the wrong way, I am in 100% agreement that the quality of training from many flight schools is shocking and it sounds like you run a great company that would be a pleasure to work for. I am enjoying reading your perspective, essentially sitting on the other side of the industry to me. With that in mind I want to discuss your comment:
Don't know I must be the one out of touch as just under $50 grand a year seems a reasonable wage for an apprentice.
Firstly, is in general $50k a year a lot of money? No, not when you are living in places like Broome or Darwin where rent is $200 + bills a week, food is more expensive, fuel is more expensive, any sort of 'bonus' expenses like car parts are almost twice as much as in the city. Let alone it's at least $1,000 to get return flights back home once a year before we take into account spending any money there. Compare that to full time jobs my friends are doing in Sydney, some needing professional qualifications (eg; paralegals) others not needing qualifications (eg; call centre). It's around par.
Secondly, is a commercial pilot an apprentice? I'd argue no. Please understand, I'm not some hot shot newbie who thinks I know everything. I learnt a lot in my first 150 hours skydiving, then learnt a lot during my first ICUS upon joining a charter company. And learnt a lot bashing a 210 around by myself for hundreds of hours. But the key there is by myself. I'm legally qualified to do as much in a 210 as a 20 year airline captain. To me it's not an apprentice wage but a wage for a qualified professional. Again we are in agreement the 'qualification' new pilots are getting these days may not be up to 'professional' standards but I don't think we should be reducing the wage rather increasing the training standards in this industry.
My point is if there is a cause to be taken up here, I don't think it should be that pilots (at any level) are over paid. It should be that the training syllabus is failing our students. I posted earlier about my first diversion as a charter pilot and realising it was totally different to anything I did in training. Don't even get me started on places like Swinburne that put Airline Cadets and normal students through almost exactly the same training, despite them having very different first jobs. If a passionate person got the reins in CASA, I don't think it would take much to tweak the syllabus. Make the commercial syllabus especially include more 'real world scenarios'. We can even have a buzz word for it to keep the bureaucrats happy "industry relevant training".
