Deep and fast:
"Actually, if you have paid for your training then you are more mobile as you have nothing further to pay".
That is precisely my point. If you pay for your own rating and then get a job on the basis of that, then you owe the company absolutely nothing. It's your rating and you can go anywhere you like, when you like.
But that is not really what we are discussing here. We have a bunch of would be pilots who would like to have a career in aviation but they either cannot afford to pay for a type rating (P2F) but would like to have the opportunity to join an airline that would pay all the bills for them.
Now that was the system in the old days. The company hired them unrated and spent a lot of money training them for free. So how did that go?
100 of them in my company walked out of the door in 14 years with a type rating and with no obligation to repay a penny. That is a pretty good illustration of how some pilots see loyalty versus their own desire to do what they want regardless of the consequences.
So, we lost 100 pilots at (in those days) an average of £15,000 each in direct costs which (even a thick pilot will realise) was a waste of £1,500,000. How can you blame an accountant for hiring someone who already has the type rating?
From a personal point of view it was not really my problem. As a dedicated training captain throughout most of my flying career. I always wished them well and hoped that they would have a good future (most of them did). In fact, for 7 years I was the union guy but even then, I could not believe how selfish a lot of them were.
My favourite was a young man who was a DC-10 F/O. The company that we were flying for did not spend money training pilots to do new things. You either had the rating or you didn't get hired. We persuaded the management that this guy was worth the effort and were eventually given clearance to spend money and put him through a DC-10 command course. I put a lot of effort into him and did his final line check in the presence of the FAA. Two weeks later he did a runner and joined another airline and left a lot of us with severe egg on our faces. Are you going to tell me that he didn't know he was going to go elsewhere in 2 weeks time?
So, that is where Deep and Fast makes such a valid point. The pilot pays for his rating (just like an HGV driver) and he can bugger off whenever he likes. That way, he is happy and the accountants are happy. Is that not P2F?
It's a bit unfortunate if you can't afford the rating but if your predecessors hadn't screwed the system, you would have got the rating for nothing.
By the way, I don't know if you have ever heard of the collective noun for a bunch of pilots sitting in a crewroom? I was once told that the correct term is a "whinge of pilots".