I was chatting with a devout Brexiteer about this the other day who seemed to be under the impression that this was good for UK pilots as it would cut down on competition for UK jobs.
The argument was something along the lines of assuming that airlines required a working knowledge of their local language (e.g. German for Lufthansa, etc.), and that a knowledge of English was automatically acquired through getting a licence, then EU nationals could almost by default apply for jobs in both their home country and the UK. The opposite not being true for Brits as foreign language skills tend not to stretch beyond secondary school. They believed that if UK airlines could only recruit from the UK in the future, then 90% of the potential competition (i.e. EU residents with English as a 2nd language) would be eliminated. It was an interesting point that sort of made sense at the time (after a long day) but, clearly this simplistic argument ignores anything to do with the state of the economy and political agreements, but who worries about that silly stuff
