Being a cadet of the airline in question I've received no word of such changes, can you please confirm where you heard this and what exactly the changes are?

As for the other airlines, wizz aren't running any P2F programme at the moment and the other 2 are opening cadet programmes (not P2F) with selection already underway because they can't get enough people to sign up to their P2F stuff post fATPL graduation.

Wizzair is mainly sending people to Airbus in Toulouse for the type, not exactly the last ato in europe.

You can either pay about 14000 eur upfront, or be bonded for 420 a month for three years. And if you stay 3 years you get back 7500 eur.

Nothing like pay to fly, actually one of the best arrangements in europe for type ratings, much better than let's say easyjet, that is/was charging 2,5 times as much, with no possibility of bonding.

According to your friend, does the free type rating from Airbus include accommodation, transportation to and from Toulouse, base training, basic training salary... These things alone cost way more than deducted from the salary. So if we could drop the "Wizz Air does pay to fly programs" statement, that would be closer to the reality.

As an observer from “across the pond”, you’re in a tight spot for a few reasons and maybe I can provide some clarity on things within the US.

The barrier to entry at an airline is much lower compared to the U.S.
This is compounded by companies having the ability to register and base around Europe based not only on regulation but also salary.
Finally, as far as I can tell from lurking here, there is no union in the EU with scale like ALPA that exists in the US/Canada.

There are so many committees at the individual airline and national levels that do so much. For example, there are literally volunteers visiting universities and large flight schools talking to students about the profession. You can imagine their reaction to uninformed newbies expressing their desire to fly only the shiniest of RJs no matter the wage.

ALPA has also in the past held airline-specific job fairs involving the recruiting teams of major airlines...the only way to get a ticket was to be an ALPA member in good standing.

It almost horrifies me to see comments on this thread stating that £130,000 is somehow some kind of princely sum for an “easy” gig. Especially given the cost of living in London, it should be almost double that flying 85 hours per month in the left seat.

Im not saying the US system is better, I made $18,000 dollars my first year at an airline. We did a lot of four day trips, so I was literally hauling 5-6 cans of ravioli and packages of ramen noodles in my bag.

What I am saying (based on what I see...corrections are welcome) is that given the obstacles you are facing that are unique to Europe, the unions like BALPA and VC need to merge and collaborate much more closely than they currently are. You’re being pattern bargained against by every airline in the EU, and your unions need to wake up and become an EU union!

Every Ryanair, or Norwegian, or SAS Ireland out there is the enemy. The compensation is irrelevant. It’s the model and the “contractor” type employment offers that bring US pilots to these boards frothing at the mouth. Why? Because at the next BA, AF, or LH contract negation, the company is going to slide it across the table. The next negotiation or two after that? It’ll be at Delta, AA, and United.

This is an environment that requires communication and engagement from the rank and file at every level to reverse the trend.

“If you’re going to fight, fight like you’re the third monkey in line at Noah’s Ark, and brother, it’s starting to rain.”

G-code,
You have well summarised the reasons why airlines are pushing for pilotless aircraft. Quietly but all across the board, so it will happen much sooner than people think. Ironically the last pilot jobs to remain on the market will be with those bottom scrapers listed above as they tend to operate older equipment.

CargoOne, there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of your contention, probably best summed up with this anecdote (from the 1950's).

Difference Engine: Luddite legacy: Is smart technology now destroying more jobs than it creates?

Pilotless aircraft will, by their very nature, require a fundamental and drastic overhaul and redesign of not just aircraft but the entire air traffic control infrastructure. The cost and time consumption involved with designing systems that are proven to work within that framework and to ease them in would be monumental. For many many years yet it’s going to be far cheaper and simpler to retain pilots. Yes eventually there will be pilotless aircraft, I don’t think anyone doubts that but - in an age where we can’t even stay logged on to CPDLC for more than five minutes - that day is not even remotely on the horizon.

@gcode, the EU and the US are not comparable on many levels. For one is still a federation of more or less sovereign countries. In some parts there are EU regulations, but not in all, and one of those areas is employment/working law. Therefore unions are regulated by different rules in every country and their power effectively ends at the borders of each country. Companies on the other hand can work crossborder as much as they want to. There are local regulations of course, but they can work with them, the important stuff is european legislation.
Unions are working more closely together, but there are practical and psychological limits to that. ECA is the central organisation for that, but it is not a union it its own right, rather a EU lobby organisation.

Not to mention, the aviation market is of course completely different between the US and EU. The chance to get 1500 hours for every pilot the airlines need is simply not there, the GA business sector is a lot smaller in europe, in some parts nearly non-existent.

And yes, i do agree with the realisation that the major carriers will be put under pressure in the foreseeable future, it happened already at Lufthansa, but they still managed to put fence around their conditions, however at the price at completely removing their scope clause.

90% of the time it is easy. 9% of the time we earn our money and 1% of the time, there isn’t enough money in any bank for what we do. The decent salary is the “happy” medium to cover for the 1%.

TayCough that’s precisely right. We don’t scream “overpaid” at heart surgeons because they’re not constantly in the operating room. I wonder why that ethos suddenly becomes different when applied to pilots sitting in the cruise? Snobbery probably.

Obama in his recent interview with Prince Harry, talked about the inability of workers to unionise effectively across boarders in our new globalised world. I couldn’t help but think of the current situation at Ryanair.

The fact of the matter is a lot of these institutions like the EU work to benefit the big corporations, whilst forgetting about the ordinary man and woman. That’s why there is ultimately so much disillusionment with the EU. If the EU had of brought more benefits to the people, like the elimination of roaming charges when we use our mobiles within the EU, then perhaps we wouldn’t have Brexit. Being able to Unionise across the EU is something we desperately need.

Anyhow, why doesn’t the likes of ALPA branch out into EU? They seem to be much more effective at collective bargaining! I think the likes of BALPA is too gentlemanly for its own good, you have to play these CEOs at their own game.

People talk about pilotless aircraft like that’s the only piece of the jigsaw. Ground handling, ground infrastructure, ATC, maintenance logging, fuelling etc etc. It’s a minefield without deciding who is to blame when things go wrong. At the moment, the crew are a suitable scapegoat. Who’s gonna carry the can without them?
Drone freighters, yep, passengers aircraft.....well I wouldn’t get on one.

Well until my new 737-800 can follow a simple VNAV path on auto-pilot without getting woefully high on profile I’m not going to get too worried about pilotless airliners.

I am guessing a pilotless airliner’s autopilot would have access to the speedbrake just like you, and so would easily follow the VNAV path. Besides, that particular problem is easily solved by giving the aircraft access to more wind data for the descent.
There will always be the odd circumstance where human decision making would beat the computer, but there are currently far more circumstances of human error.
I think the concept of pilotless airliners will be accepted once driverless cars become the norm, but there is still a decade or two left in the human pilot yet.

https://www.theguardian.com/australi...foreign-flyers

Interesting development...

The problem is, the computer is designed by the human and hence has Human errors. You can’t elminiate human error until the lord god Buddha himself pilots airplanes.

Driverless cars may well become the norm but the thing is that when they go wrong, they can just stop... the first time a pilotless plane goes wrong there’ll be no one flying them. As an analogy, I’m pretty sure we could perform major surgery on someone with a robot - but if it got it wrong, would you be prepared to undergo the knife of one in the future?

As long as safety-critical systems continue to be built by humans, there’ll be a human nearby to takeover when needs be. Automated Cars/trains/and similar ‘simply switch off’ systems are usually more of an inconvenience when they go wrong, rather than a pile of bodies.

As an outside observer of Europe, this is a symptom of a bigger picture: Globalised Regulatory Arbitrage.

In a globalised word, corporates have effectively figured out how to use country level regulation to exploit & suppress labour cost as it is relatively, immobile whilst shifting mobile assets to avoid costs, taxes & regulation. They shift their revenues, costs and obligations to jurisdiction of choice. The Tech companies are at the leading edge of this. They operate everywhere, but are based nowhere. . Effectively beyond almost any regulation at all.

In effect, any costs above the lowest common denominator such as skilled labour, taxes, regulatory obligations are optional. If they can find the lowest cost jurisdiction for each of their cost centres, then the cost base will be sent there, yet charged through a shell to the high tax jurisdiction (tax arbitrage through transfer pricing). Labour in the high cost countries are for the most part immobile, and are therefore faced with lowering their price to compete or risk losing jobs.

Globalisation was sold as a way to gain access cheap manufactured goods, but the end game was always the importation of third world labour rates to the first world. This aim has substantially been achieved.

Europe with its EU federation structure of sovereign states seems to have been most vulnerable to this trend with a great deal of scope for arbitrage. The US seems to have less, however they have had Chapter 11 as a tool since deregulation.

Asia is the next area, however, it seems that history & culture have made it more difficult for Western corporations to exploit. One Oz operator tried to use this system in Asia, but found they had no understanding of how business was done in that part of the world & has been skinned alive by the local elites.

If you read your own article you’d see in the first paragraph that the accident was caused by the other vehicle (driven by a human) reversing into the stationary self-drive bus. But somehow that’s the fault of the bus?
Do yourself a favour - go to YouTube and do a search for Russian Car Accidents. That’ll keep you entertained for at least a week.

No doubt the radio operators, navigators and flight engineers at their respective times were sure aircraft will not fly without them just because of complication of the job they have been doing.
Trains without stockers? Cars without personal mechanics? Oh wait...

It costs over 25 million euros to man the cockpit over the average lifespan of narrobody jet. This is half of the brand new aircraft price. You may complain that ATC automation still not there? Because airlines are not interested. Now, if they will be given a chance to save 25m per aircraft, systems will do a magic leap in no time

Still not convinced but I guess this isn’t the right thread to get further into it.
Cheers