Adding to the discussion, if the lack of financing does trigger a reduced number of wannabes applying, maybe the airlines will start to look at the "forgotten ones".
Those cadets, like myself, who worked their arses off to fund their own training through the modular route, as they thought resilience and commitment was worth something in aviation(not really).
Still struggling to find employment as I'm not from the top 3 schools. It is funny to visit the Pilot careers fair and hear the rhetoric " there is a tremendous shortage", when the very few opportunities to modular cadets are often oversubscribed with applicants.
My point is, the MPL scheme that Easyjet runs can close for a year and they will still be able to find cadets already trained to fill those seats. If there is an issue with standard, there are courses available to bridge the gap. I was told by CTC that Flybe first officer database was 1.500 strong, with the vast majority being low hour cadets. Imagine how big is Ryanair's?
It is ridiculous to pay £120K for a course, and it is even worse that the price went up so fast in a short period of time, with little change to the product. It won't be a bad thing for young wannabes to wait, I know I did and worked to save part of the cash, it is a good character builder after all and it will open opportunities for us that were left behind due to CTC/OAA/FTE greed.
Also, talking about high quality candidates, I have met CTC and OAA grads who really struggled through training, with a pretty poor record and were ''pushed" through the hoops, one wouldn't fly solo too far from the airfield in NZ as he was scared, now flies for the big Orange.
That arrogant attitude that if you haven't joined those schools you must be
needs some revisiting. My instructors were all fighter pilots and the standard was high, its quite insulting to hear that sort of thing. There are several outfits in Europe and UK with a lot of quality and I do hope these 3 schools lose their monopoly for the sake of fairness.