What has changed in the last 20 years?

[AlphaMale]

What's up with the animals?!?

I did read somewhere that John used to work with these animals, so I'm sure he'll be one of these grandfathers that will tell some amazing tales of how he lived his younger days.

I live my Gorillas Orangs and Tigers so I'll be pretty damn jealous of you if you get to work with some great wildlife and become a pilot!

Good luck John

[Re-Heat]

So my question why does some people here think they have the right to get a RH jet seat after 250 hours CPL/IR and ATPL theory course/exams.

You operate in a job market, and when that market went into overdrive, people were able to jump those preliminary stages. Perceptions were therefore formed of the normal route, and combined with massive debt obligations (which can only be serviced through jet salaries), the average wannabe sees only the jet job.

At issue is the fact that some courses, which cost a great deal, would only have been available to sponsored courses in the past. With the decline of those, their intakes are filled with less suitable people that are less able to make the direct leap (and would therefore benefit from a long "apprenticeshipe") but are unable to square that with their debt or expectations.

The problem with offering a loan for the courses is that it is entirely unassessed - rigourous psychometric and aptitude testing has fallen by the wayside, and is arguable the fundamental cause of the entire problem of misaligned perceptions - replaced instead with a rigorous sim check, which only then weeds out those capable of direct jet work vs those who will be great once they have worked through instruction and prop jobs.

[tigermagicjohn]

Personally I do not believe in the psychometric and aptitude testing, I did few of those in the army 20 years ago, and basicly unless you are an complete idiot, they are not very hard to make a decent average score, and if you are in the first category you will probably not manage to pass 14 ATPL exams anyway. So I do not see much effect in those tests, as they can be presented in so many ways, with many different results. I do not like the fact that somebody have worked out mostly completly irrelevant tests to flying, to assess you. Personally I found them fun to do, as I liked the IQ style testing, but for me was more like a fun game to play.
I have tried many diffrent tests, you spend 12 months on ATPL theory, 1000 hours flying and instructing, and then you can loose out because some silly pshyco test, which mostly has no relevance to flying at all.

Also the starter "Jet salaries" are not really that great. But guess the others salaries are even worse - still for me the fun of flying has to be more than watching a monitor for 2 to 12 hours.