The post below has generated a relatively spirited response on the Dununda & Godzone Reporting Points page over the last 24 hours. I’m posting it here at the suggestion of one respondent to see if it engenders anywhere near the same reaction in the wider world of Aviation. Moderators, if you feel it’s a waste of bandwidth repeating it here, I’ll understand completely if you choose to bin it.
(A note for any Americans reading this thread: I must explain that ‘wearing a thong’ presents a very different mental image to most Australians than it does to someone from the US. In Australia, someone wearing a thong would be limping down in street in one rubber shower slipper. Similarly, a singlet is a sleeveless undervest, and a blue one is favoured outer attire for many manual labourers in the Land Dununda.)
Wiley
*****
Trolling through D&G, I came upon the now locked ‘Derogatory Comments’ thread. It was a shame, (if inevitable), to see it locked, if only because of the last post from
Desert Digger.
The days of the professional pilot are numbered, and soon you will all be relegated to coming to work in navy blue singlets, thongs, and a handkerchief tied around your head.
Desert Digger echoes my own long-held sentiments to a ‘T’ with that comment, but then goes on to say “
And all thanks to the scabs and heroes of (the Australian airline dispute of) '89. So for you idiots who want to bleat "get over it", it will be you, undoubtedly the youthful pilots of today, who will pay a higher price professionally, than anyone who can claim to be an '89er.”
I suspect he’s also right to some degree in his last comment. ‘89 certainly would have played some part in the seemingly endless downward spiral of working conditions the industry has suffered over the last decade – if not immediately for the heroic few who enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) incredibly good wages thanks to it. (You can be sure that few upcoming management trainees completely ignore it the way so many younger pilots seem to do judging by their comments on this site.)
But there are many more factors than 1989 at play here, so could we discuss this with a slightly wider brush? Do you believe it is going to get as bad as DD (and I) think it will? One hundred and twenty years ago, to be an ‘engineer’ on a train – today’s humble train driver - was an extremely well paid and highly respected position. Until around 1970, a merchant seaman officer enjoyed similar high recompense and prestige.
Both are now ‘navy blue singlets and thongs’ positions in the main, in the merchant marine case, done by poorly paid and sometimes dubiously trained ‘professionals’ from Third World countries.
I can’t speak with any real knowledge of what caused the descent of the railways to their present state. However, the merchant marine reached the position it is in today after ‘bright’ MBAs forty years ago saw a way to save money by ‘dumbing down’ the job with Third World (read ‘cheap’) labour, both seamen as well as officers. Cargo shipping today suffers quite horrendous losses at sea, which, because Westerners are seldom involved, gets almost no coverage in the Western media. Now many shipping companies have come to see that the current ‘cheap’ setup has been a horrible mistake (and is anything but cheap), but it’s too late. The rump of professional seamen officers is gone, they were not replaced over the last 30 years, and even if (magically), a large number of young men of the same calibre as used to apply to be merchant marine officers were somehow to come forward to take up jobs in the industry, there’s no one and no system in place to train them.
There were once many young men who had a passion for the sea every bit as deep as the passion many of us hold for Aviation. Today, it’s hard to believe there’ll ever be a shortage of young men and women who’ll want to fly aeroplanes, (but I’d lay London to a brick that someone said that forty years ago about the merchant navy).
So, as uncomfortable as it might be to face the fact, will we see a different kind of recruit into the airline ranks in the not too distant future? The current enormous outlay in time, effort and money to even qualify for the first rung of the ladder (with no guarantee of employment at the end of it) will surely make it less and less attractive to someone planning a career in the industry if they can see no meaningful recompense (or let’s be honest, prestige?) for all that effort except the joy of tooling about the sky in an airliner.
So, is Aviation, or the vast majority of it outside an ever reducing core of major Flag Carriers,
destined for the same fate as the merchant marine? (And will the aviation industry, like the shipping companies, discover (too late) that they’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water?)