It's a long time since I've seen so many transparent agendas coupled with so much willy waving in one thread.
Simple version for the text messaging generation:
Re Read the posts by the Welshman - he is the only one giving the unvarnished truth and thinking of your debts!!
Now for the tricky bits with long words in like 'wheelbarrow' and 'marmalade'.
You are being sold a crock of crap in this thread especially by the entire Spanish mob who are now beginning to make the Floridian's look like amateurs.
1: Human nature is such that most people will always justify a large outlay they chose to make as being considered, wise and ultimately worthwhile.
2: Much of the time you are being written to by people making their living from you and they are not telling you this. They are pushing their 'brand' desperate to get recognition. They are desperate because they have such a short time to establish the brand with you. The half life of a wannabee is a short and fragile thing. Once you've signed for a school it's all over because they know and we know that the day you get your licence the school becomes a fading memory.
3: You are not getting advice from anyone with more than 3 years in an airliner seat.
4: The qualified are not getting jobs because there aren't any. If you are a captain though there is work if you can manage to walk to the aircraft unaided. This will change - again reread what the Welshman says and not what someone who has courses to fill up tells you.
5 They rely on you being impressed by just a few school names with supposed airline connections. They rely on you getting all wet and moist over a sexy sounding sim and they hope they can sucker airlines into looking at them again when the market picks up a bit.
Still with me? Now here's the truth from the airline side of things. Cut and paste this onto your desktop to read everytime someone wants your money.
Airline Secret Number 1:
The airlines don't know who the hell the schools are. The only ones that might impinge on their consciousness are the ones like CTC that invite them for an annual free pissup! They want someone with a full licence, bags of enthusiasm and who they reckon their skippers can put up with for many hours a day. That's it - they don't have the time to look at schools - they don't care. It's the CAA they have to keep happy and therefore you have an entrance ticket - one the CAA - not the damn schools - guarantee
Airline Secret Number 2:
The airlines know that the MCC is supposed to be provided by and funded by them. The schools have leapt in because it wasn't specified that they couldn't. They joined in because it gives them the potential to keep each student in the system longer during lean times and thereby continue the revenue stream - from you suckers!!
FTO Secret No. 1
The minute 5 of you said you'd got MCC to help stand out from the others it was game over - avalanches of money, trebles all round. You are doing it again with Jet training devices. The schools can't believe their luck, their jaws drop further at what a load of fashion conscious sheep you collectively become.
As you've now painfully worked out this means therefore that JOC's are simply new ways of taking more money from you because you don't have a job to go to. Please write this on your hand to remember folks. The airlines don't know what a JOC or one of the clones is. There is no requirement for it. Training departments at airlines would be extremely pissed off because they want you to learn their way. They waste a lot of time and money training the old stuff out of your single pilot IR/GFT skillset without it being added to by non company or type specific MCC's and other add on tosh.
FTO Secret No.2:
Jet sims - Spanish, UK don't give a stuff. They are luring you in with pretty toys. They are sales devices to impress - marketing tools.
Spending more time on classic round dials are the most important thing you can ever do to ensure a long, safe career. Anything else is sales patter. If any one of the FTO folks argues otherwise just ask them why we had to use desktop Frasca's at a time when they couldn't produce enough pilots to fill demand and they were awash with money?
Stating you need efis skills is arrant rubbish because you have to relearn totally with each airfamer's product you move to. It's just like Windows, Mac and Linux users having swop machines. It looks familiar but it turns out that all you really know is how to get into serious trouble
No ripostes on that point from any dreamers or sim fans. You've either got that real life T-shirt or you haven't.
Finally, check this thread again and especially any replies to this post that appear.
Use you new found skill and judgement to categorise each post.
Someone one step ahead of you justifying their immense spending decision;
Someone keeping a roof over their head by taking wannabees money;
or someone who has done everything you want to do, succeeded, paid off every penny of debt by working on a jet flight deck and is giving you cooly thought through advice from a proper, experienced airline perspective.
Finally, I've been flying since 1975 and I will tell you this for free. In your journey through flight training you will be very lucky if you even meet 5 people in FTO's with integrity and no other thought than helping you. With a very few honourable and legendary exceptions they will be career flying and ground instructors with no say in sales, marketing, premises or equipment.
Therefore the conclusion should be obvious - those with a say in the last 4 items should be held at arms length and treated as, at best, deeply suspicious until they prove otherwise and more often as utterly without merit. The wannabees motto is 'caveat emptor.' If your latin's a little rusty that translates to 'sales and marketing does attract some scum but the worst head for aviation'..............
Regards
Rob
Moggie,
My apologies for singling you out but I am keeping this response separate from my overall thoughts. You are giving considered and, what you honestly believe to be, accurate advice on SOPS.
However, I'm afraid you are wrong and you are wrong in every conceivable way purely because you are an instructor. It also proves the reasons for our vehement opposition here at the Towers to FTO's carrying out MCC's and all the other flim flam and scams.
The reason SOP's seem similar and easy to slip between is because, well err, you are an instructor - it's what you do, umm repeatedly, day in and day out.
As working airline pilots what we do is the
same SOP's
repeatedly - if fact more repeatedly than you can ever dream of. That's how they got their name not because they change them everyday. It is habituated learned behaviour - it goes deeper than you or any other instructor will ever understand.
SOPS are like breathing. One day, out of the blue an SOP call will come from your lips that is from a company ten years in your past.
The days after SOPS change at an airline are the most desperate, uncomfortable foul ones. The entire flightdeck operation becomes an uncontrolled, shambolic farce.
Ask the guys at easyJet - they went from the SOP's you describe to standard Boeing overnight - oh, and then they changed again recently with the adoption of many Go procedures.
I see the private forums - you don't. Without exception the greatest cause of operational heartbache on the line is new SOP's. Especially when it's just because of a new 'squadron boss' making his or her mark.
One of the many reasons Scroggs. the Welshman and myself step in and take the FTO's to task is because they don't have the faintest idea what an airline pilot's life entails in the important areas.
MCC's outside of the airlines are an entirely counter productive scam. SOP's to working pilots are totally different languages - often many in the same company.
I'm afraid your penultimate paragraph is the only correct one for an airline pilot. You care about what you write but it just proves why we constantly have to ride on the FTO's.
Genuine regards to you,
Rob