Please guys… let’s not get sidetracked with bob’orke-bashing on this thread. I think there’ll be quite enough uncomfortable home truths published about the man once ‘His Supreme Litigiousness’ has gone to meet his maker (who he doesn’t believe in) without our having to buy into it here. (And my guess is that 89 won’t get more than a passing reference among the other facts that will eventually come to light.)
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Back to the subject: at 7x7’s suggestion, I repeated my original post on the main PPrune board in Aircrew Notices. It’s been interesting to compare the very few, but well considered responses on that thread to the response here. Either very few people read ‘Aircrew Notices’ or the overseas pilot population have a distressingly low awareness level about this subject.
Repeating myself again, here’s a response I made on ‘Aircrew Notices’ that could well have been an answer to the third last paragraph of Kaptain M’s last post. I agree with his comment – I wish more would look past the simplistic reaction to the ‘navy blue singlets’ comment and look at the deeper implications behind the attention-grabbing title.
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My fear is pretty well exactly what ‘ornithopter’ said – I fear the drying up of the supply of committed young aviators capable of doing the job as the job becomes less and less attractive thanks to the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ it is currently suffering at the hands of ‘bright’(!) MBAs who can’t look further ahead than the next six monthly statement. With the deepening reduction in conditions we are seeing worldwide, we will one day see a situation where the job becomes so unattractive that there won’t be enough youngsters out there with the qualifications and the qualities that are required to fill the job today.
So what will the companies do? They’ll lower - or to use a less emotive word, ‘amend’ - the minimum standard required to fill the seats. I know there’ll be people ready to protest loudly that there’ll never be a pilot shortage, and I accept that they’re probably right. However, it’s not a ‘pilot shortage’ per se that I fear, it’s a shortage of what we in the profession class as a pilot today. I fear that if the companies can’t find pilots, they’ll employ people who will not have the skills or experience to do the job without the automatics, so they’ll re-tailor the job where using the automatics all the time becomes mandatory. (You can almost hear the conversation in the Boardroom from here: “We don’t really need pilots anymore. What we need is I.T. graduates to monitor the computers. After all, these pilots, all they do is program computers, don’t they?”)
From there, it’s a short step to the job becoming a clone of the inner city train drivers of today who do no more than open and close the doors. I hear some saying that you’ll always have to have someone capable of manually flying the aircraft, but will you? If there’s not enough people out there with the skills required, the bean counters will be able to prove that it will be cheaper to suffer delays every ‘n’ thousand flights when the degraded automatics demand a cancellation or a diversion where a costly pilot could have completed the flight. The same argument could be made about it being ‘cheaper’ to suffer a hull loss every ‘n’ years than it would be to train pilots to the degree required to reach the standards we today accept as a minimum.
I can see it going the way of the merchant marine. After twenty years, someone will see they may have made a mistake, (as I understand they have acknowledged in the shipping industry), but by then, it will be too late.