Does anyone have access to numbers of 457 Visas in the Aviation Industry? I'd love to see a breakdown of those working RPT and GA, perhaps even further broken down in Charter, Instructing, Floats, Survey etc...
And Band a Lot, how is that a "Right", he runs a business, there are expectations that come with that, he goes on about earning over $8million a year in Profit yet can't seem to put much of that back into training? If he wants to run his business that way, so be it, but it seems like now with the change to 457 Visas he'll have to find a new way to run it and hopefully that new way of running will include spending a bit more on training new Pilots and giving first timers a bit of a chance. Also interesting to read on the Sydney Seaplanes website their big speech about "Investing in the Community", but not in their own training apparently...
Is there no way to go about campaigning for a change to the Pilots Award to allow for Bonding? Surely it shouldn't be too difficult to put in a section that allows Employers to Bond Employees for reasonable costs for "New Type Training" (Can't say endorsements as that would leave out the lower end of town, ie C310s, Barons, 402s etc... as they are no longer endorsements). It would put an onus on the Employer to only bond for reasonable costs and for the employee to actually be willing to give that time to make it worthwhile. How would this get done?
Dick Smith, is this not something you could perhaps put some words out about as from this thread it seems to be a common theme?