Perhaps the most important aspect of military aviation is that they do not, as a rule, pay for an expensive and extensive training course so you can wear it on your CV as a 'trophy'. You do the course because you are destined to spend the next one or two (or more) years working as a Flight Instructor. Teaching day in day out for that period gives you the skills to be able to properly understand the teaching and learning process whereas a dicky little 'box-ticking' number will at best only equip you to repeat your PPL experience to those wannabes with enough money to throw at the task.
I cannot see for the life of me why this transparent problem is so difficult for the authorities to understand. If the industry wants pilots there should be no structural subsidy in the form of weak and ineffective regulations but instead the industry must put their hands in their pockets and run proper 'cadet' schemes that have proved successful in the past. Only when operating companies have to pay are they then concerned about the value they get for their money.
These two things are not different and commercially for helicopters could never be different and actually I don't understand the catch all language.
Firstly why is there a trophy to any of this? This has rapidly gone down a path that suggests that anything funded privately is junk and only motivated by ego. Not only that but that anyone engaged in military aviation is only motivated by the job without any thought to his future commercial worth... On both counts that is utter nonsense.
The problem to much of this boxing ticking is rooted in the way from day 1 hours are logged and pretty much everything is based upon that metric. PPL (H), x hours, CPL pre-requisites x more hours, and so it goes all the way to turbine time, instrument time, etc.
The whole thing by its very nature a box ticking exercise.
Moving on from that how is this to work differently from today? Or rather it could but how would it be realistic??
industry must put their hands in their pockets and run proper 'cadet' schemes that have proved successful in the past. Only when operating companies have to pay are they then concerned about the value they get for their money
To "run" a scheme would need everyone to universally accept that the current system is defective and what metric will that be judged? Then even were there to be a metric which aligned with that view (which I don't believe there is) the capital investment would be huge. Beyond which how does it cater for the smaller companies with an AOC's? Does PDG need an entire in house training organisation?
No? You say all the training could be undertaken from one central training centre?? PDG would just fund their own cadet?? Oh ok..... So what about if Mr Deep pockets is self funding his own course? Then suddenly that course is in someway junk??
Although given the margins seem so thin that, for example, at one end of the scale an organisation as large as CHC is on the brink because of a Petrobas contract wobble because of a helicopter tech issue and the price of crude to local organisations who continually go pop having won a pipeline contract on a bunch of assumptions and leave nothing on the table... Anyone remember how well the National Grid contract treats helicopter companies? Sterling helicopters what happened to them??