Flypuppy’s ( and so some extent LOAJ’s ) post above made me think about an article I once read ( from the Telegraph ) and so I dug it out - just don’t ask why I’ve kept it.
What’s interesting is how the times have changed – albeit that, in some ways they have and in some ways they haven’t.
SIR – Your Air Correspondent’s report ( Aug.3 ) refers to the problems created by a growing pilot shortage for the independent airlines and third level operators.
This pilot shortage will continue for the simple reason the British Airways will absorb virtually all the promising young ( and not so young ) pilot available in the coming few years, since their existing pilot work force is of a comparatively advanced age due to no pilot training or recruitment in recent years. The independent airlines will face a worse shortage since they have not, to a man, invested any money in ab initio pilot training, or even training to upgrade basically qualified pilots, for over twenty years. Now, too late, they seek to reverse this situation by training a small number of pilots for their rapidly depleting ranks. In other walks of life, companies generating the sort of turnover and profits we are talking about would have apprenticeship schemes, university sponsorships and managers devoted to the provision of suitable future employees.
In the case of the independent airlines, in their headlong search for return on capital to the exclusion of everything else, they have relied on young men often of very limited means who have been prepared to beggar themselves in the expensive pursuit of pilots’ licenses so they could fulfil their ambition to fly. Now they accuse these same young men of disloyalty and worse when they leave to join British Airways and other national operators, to the extent that they seek to sue for their minimal costs in aircraft type training ( when compared with the huge costs these young men have incurred so they could qualify ). I am afraid that these independent airlines have brought this shortage on themselves by their short-sighted and parsimonious attitudes and must now stew in their own juice.
This stew will take an interesting form. It will consist of a cessation in the current huge expansion in the inclusive tour trade, an increasing burden on aircraft commanders in the independent sector who will have to put up with semi-trained and inexperienced First Officers ( initial evidence of this is the 20 Eastern European gentlemen who turned up here to fly British passengers out of this country for an independent airline and who were grounded after simulator competence tests ), a consequent and general lowering of standards, an increase in costs and tour prices and, it is to be hoped, a greater exclusivity and return to more pleasurable airport environments.
These airlines claim respectability. Let them show it by investing in the future and their prime human resource, instead of taking all the profit for unbridled expansion.
I’m open to your suggestions as to which year the above was written in ( ostensibly by a Captain on a B767 ) and, perhaps more to the point of this thread, of what’s changed since then ( assuming you can place the date ).
Erata.....
Hulk - a p!ss costs nothing, but a type-rating costs about £20k ( and the line training option, if you want it, is extra ) and also, when I was last 'on the dole', the money I got from HM Government didn't even cover my modest
weekly wine bill - and yet I, as a high-rate tax payer, have regularly / annually payed more in tax than most people earn - so go figure !
LOAJ - I was not being sarcastic, I was just trying to remind one and all of the simple truth that with you, me, all of us, paying to get our feet on the aviation ladder we are, by that very fact that we pay, subsidising the airlines and therein set something of a precedent.
Now as so many here seem keen to point out, w.r.t. how many doctors, lawyers, train-drivers, etc, are required to pay for their training ? Well, in respect of the first two, to be any good you’ve got to be really smart - something which, I’m afraid to say, is hardly the case with being an airline pilot ( rocket science it ain’t ! ) - and in the latter case nobody wants to do it anymore, e,g. the only people you see getting excited at railway stations, and if they’ll excuse me saying this about them, are ‘anoraks’ – whereas at air shows and RAF / airline open days ?
It’s all about supply and demand and, at the moment, the supply outstrips the demand ( and has done for a long time ) and so aspiring airline wannabes have to join a long queue, wherein your place in that queue depends much upon luck ( oh yes, a lot of luck is required ) along with your aeronautical qualifications and experience.
Flypup's - keep climbing the wall old mate, as, believe it or not, some of us are genuinely at the top and trying to help pull you over it.
Ps. The above edited for afterthoughts.