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

I think still many people would rather be bonded for a couple of years and only pay 7500 eu after 3 years without having to take out a loan and pay huge amounts of interests...
I'm not sure but isn't it usually the case with Airbus they are willing to offer the TR because of such a big order?


Speaking of charity, rumour has it the orange company in the UK is getting paid by L3CTS to take their cadets, and how does L3CTS get its money back? By charging crazy amounts for an Airbus typerating without any accommodation provided etc...

Yet, still barely an airline willing to give an option of lower pay for a great schedule that might tempt a certain percentage of pilots that would love to see a month on/month off schedule.

Almost always a crap schedule that won't allow someone to commute or commuting with significant days off in a row. I am lucky with my 5.5 weeks/3 weeks.

Driverless trains came out donkeys ago, yet take a trip down to any major train station and how many driverless trains do you see? I counted 0 in Euston yesterday. Train drivers aren't exactly cheap either.

My simple question is if we have barely even rolled out driverless trains and they only exist on a very small fraction of services, then how on earth are we supposed to have pilotless planes anytime soon?

Everyone is talking about pilotless a/c. They claim the argument is proved by crewless other transport services. Unfortunately Mother-nature doesn't affect those other services in quite the same way. I grant you that on a perfect day a pilotless a/c might, just might succeed; even a drone ground controlled a/c might quote with some dodgy circumstances. Today the pressure is to depart with minimum fuel. Consider the scenario where things do not go ideally as planned and decisions need to be made; options considered and choices made, but fuel does not give you much spare time. What about the on-board emergency that throws a spanner in the works and an en-route diversion is needed. What about arriving at destination with a little spare fuel and the runway is blocked for an estimated delay that just might be manageable, but you'd end up below final reserve if you hold.
If all they are doing is trying to save pilot salary costs & training + recurrence costs, what about cabin crew costs? What about unnecessary diversion costs and the consequent costs of flight cancellations? Are they going to remove cabin crew? Are they going to cancel pax compensation payments?
It's all pie in the sky. There is more to the argument than technology. Conference calls can remove the need for much business travel. Virtual reality, home style, can remove the need for holiday breaks. I can sit at home with a viral tour of a city on my smat=phone and goggles, then go out to a local restaurant of the relevant cuisine. If necessary I can have an afternoon in Centre Parks as well. But we don't. Before we get pilotless a/c there will be driverless taxis. That will have to succeed first. Then perhaps crewless ferries and cruise ships. Self-ticketing ferris and bring your own food & booze on cruises. Don't think anytime soon.

Having pilotless planes is one thing, but getting the fair paying public to fly on them is a completely different kettle of fish.

Driverless trains are often cited as "proof" that pilotless airplanes are just around the corner. This ignores that there is a huge difference between the two. A train moves in only one direction ..along the track and the controls on a train are pretty simple: speed up, slow down, or apply brake. That's it. apply power or apply brake. And in every forseeable emergency situation with a train, the correct action is "apply brake". There's really no comparison with something that maneuvers freely in all 3 dimensions and can not simply stop, right now, as can a train.

indeed, but for now however it seems we'll just have to put up with the nonsense from many of those outside the flying game about how our jobs are all gonna be taken over by a computer :ugh:

No pilots
 

No pilots in the cockpit will not happen in the next 30 years or my guess even never.
Flying has so many variables:
-GPS ( flick of a button it can be switched off or jammed ...it happened to me)
-dogs crossing the runway. ( happened to me)
-birds (ask captain Sully)
-GS calling you 1500ft/min down and autopilot following.
-So many weather factors ....lightning/hail/turbulence etc etc
-I am not even talking about things breaking down.
-Passengers or cargo are also a huge variable they can do some strange stuff

Of course there are sufficient examples of pilot error but you don’t hear of all the times were we pilot needs to intervene due to system error. If we would simply not do our job then a lot more accidents would happen. The fact that flying is so safe is because we sit there to counteract (normally) any of these variables.

I read in a article that the US (only) loses on average about 25 Reapers a year of the 400 they have. That would mean we would lose around 2500 aircraft a year if there were 40.000 aircraft worldwide.
Connecting an aircraft to a ground station gives also another dozen problems.

Even Voyager in Star Wars flying at warp speed has a captain :}

As long as airlines keep buying aircraft there will be a shortage for qualified pilots. I do not foresee a change of the buying trend.
I don’t believe there will be a shortage for inexperienced pilots. Finding pilots to school is easy just open a funded program and the classes will be full but getting pilots experienced is a different story. That wil take much more time.
Also a continent which will require a huge amount of pilots in the future is Africa.

My uncle ran his own engineering firm and would from take his products from R&D, testing, manufacturing right through to sales. Something no engineering firm does these days. A bit of advice he gave me was to never be the first to try something, always be the second and learn from the first’s mistakes.

Thus, this is another point to consider concerning pilotless aircraft. That is why Boeing, Airbus or any major airline is not in a rush to try out unmanned aircraft. Whilst pilotless aircraft are a concept with some feasiblilty, actually making them a reality presents colossal challenges and many opportunities for massive failure.

Take MOL for example, who hates pilots and would love to get rid of them, if he thought there was even a hint of a chance of having pilotless aircraft successfully flying for Ryanair he would be breaking his neck to make it happen. However, he has already said to his share holders that he can’t see it happening in his lifetime. He knows rightly that pilotless airliners are a huge risk right now and he won’t be the first to take the risk.

I think it will ultimately be the bonus hungry CEOs and shareholders that push for pilotless aircraft working in conjunction with small entrepreneurial aviation research companies. It’ll start of a small experiment and maybe after many decades of trial and error we might finally fly on pilotless airliners.

Radio Altiimeter failures that create EGPWS warnings ( had it )
Weather that creates EGPWS warnings through the rad alt ( had it)
AOA vanes being blown by a stiff breeze on the ground creating stick shaker while lining up ( had it)
Cabin temperature reading 22 degrees when in fact it was over 30 and climbing, no other indications apart from pax getting very upset ( had it)
You’d have to start from scratch with all these system designs because they all rely on the pilot intervening if they go wrong. Starting from scratch will be very expensive.
Can you imagine if the weather forecasters get it wrong and all jets for capitol city A divert to Alternate B because that’s the only place they have enough gas for? With no Captain who is going to say six hours earlier at the pre flight stage “ nah actually we’ll put on another tonne cause I’m not sure the forecasters have got this right”? Certainly not the earth bound ‘dispatcher’. I’ve seen that too and people were parking aircraft on grass to get jets off the runway for fuel critical airborne aircraft.
I would bet that it won’t happen in my children’s lifetime.

What you have all missed is how pilotless planes will occur. They will simply be operated like drones are today. They will be pilotless, but not automated like a trains. The ‘pilot’ will simply fly the plane from a remote location in Nevada and all of the problems/issues of not having a human interface to deal with circumstances as they arrive will be solved.

Which leaves you still needing to pay for pilots so what’s the point of the aircraft being unmanned? They do it in the military for obvious reasons which don’t really apply to commercial aviation.

You will need less than 2 pilots per plane that way. Still I am not sure it will happen soon.

Said aircraft are not landed from Nevada. They still need a local controller to take them from around 1500' to the deck at the local landing site. The system lag due to signal transmission times make UAS unlandable from a remote site.

g-code

100% spot on. Unfortunately trans-national unions and even a framework for trans-national collective agreements are something that the collective unions and umbrella unions of the EU totally failed to grasp.

My feeling is that unions preferred to keep their national fiefdoms and the influence that came with the ability to negotiate contracts, which they were not willing to share. They totally overlooked the "divide and rule" possibilities that came with increased "agility" of corporations moving parts of their production intra-EU-"offshore", especially after the opening of a substantially cheaper labor market with the eastward expansion.

While companies can basically operate anywhere within the EU with minimal fuss, most countries labor laws don't even allow you to sign a CLA that is valid outside your own countries borders. A scope clause signed for an Alpine airline is worth nil in the neighboring country.

You can't even blame pilot unions for this as they're way too small to introduce EU-wide contracts. That was botched by the big umbrella unions who form ETF and EGB and represent labor vis-a-vis the EU institutions.

You can blame pilot unions for taking veeery long to realize that we need a strong European representation. ECE is woefully small compared to what the employers muster in terms of BRU lobbying power and many large pilot unions prefer to spend money on their home organization rather than increase forces in BRU. They still bear the brunt of ECAs spending as there are smaller unions who claim that their pilots don't earn enough to pay the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes per month to ensure their representation.

If every pilot would join a union and pay union dues at ALPA levels we might not get European CLAs but we would be able to get way more leverage. Unfortunately there are too many cheap pilots and freeloaders who shirk union membership.

Direct recruitment of union members via ECA (and maybe a way of attributing some of their dues to the national union of their current workplace) might also help.

Majority of the people advocating the case for pilotless aircraft have never been even remotely interested to become pilots. It is potential saving of 1m+ per annum per aircraft which drives it and therefore the winner is known already. Now it is just a matter of time.

Who precisely is going to invest in the "capital bridge" required to transition to the pilotless future? The airlines may reap the saving, but will ATC & airports are simply saddled with the costs? Once the transition is complete ATC & airports are going to want a Return On Investment (ROI). Everyone wants to see their ROI, locked in at minimum risk and it is one hell of a capital expense to transition every single one of the multitude of components at every single airport.

The next issue is until every piece of the puzzle is completely solved at every airport, there will have to be a transition where everyones costs are increased costs as a hybrid system will be required, with both remote & manned operations. The flight deck will still be required to give aircraft the flexibility, so no weight saving there, but with the additional cost of certification & duplication for remote ops for the lifetime of the aircraft.

Aircraft without manned capability will become only be able to fly between certain ports until the end of the transition, and this will limit their valuation in the second hand market. This was exactly the case with very large cargo ships. In many cases they were designed for specific port pairs for maximum efficiency, but were too big for any other routes. If that port pair had competition or suffered economic decline, the capital value of the ship was smashed as it had limited economic value on the secondary market. Aviation has had it's own version of this, the A380. Have the airports that invested capital to support the A380 got their required ROI? I am sure many in hindsight would not have made the investment.

Once the transition is announced, almost every piece of equipment that cannot transition to the new system is devalued as it's operating life is reduced, thus it second hand value is reduced. Previous software investment that is incompatible goes to ZERO quickly. Will the savings for the airlines justify the capital write-downs elsewhere in the system?

If you want to see how costly a major structural transition like this occurs, The Box By Marc Levinson. He follows the transition from Break Bulk cargo to containerisation, and getting everyone in the system to agree and pay for the transition. In the case of break bulk there were literally enormous savings available as every piece of cargo had to be transferred and broken up, stowed at the origin and the reverse process at the destination. This was incredibly labour intensive & expensive, with high rates of damage & loss. Yet, the transition was a Herculean task.

So yes, you are correct, it might save the airlines money, but will everyone else in the system get the savings too? It might be possible, however the bean counters elsewhere will want to make sure they get a cut of the savings and a sufficient ROI to make the risk worth while. One thing that is almost certain, the bulk of any savings are unlikely to be passed on the passenger, rather it will be captured by some entity within the system, be it manufacturers, ATC, airlines or airports.

Read Levinson's book to see how difficult a transition is despite the overwhelming economic savings dwarfing those available to airlines as a percentage of controllable costs. There is much more to this than simply removing the cockpit crew cost. Everyone in the system must agree to transition to something new, with high financial risk, therefore requiring a high ROI before the transition can begin. There are huge risks to committing to some programme without certainty of success.

Is it ultimately inevitable? Probably, but technology will have to advance to the point that it is almost a dead certainty to work before the bean counters in every part of the system decide the risks are low enough. The technology is far too immature for that. Large IT project have a high failure rate and the financial risks are still far too high. However, once the technology has reached maturity, the transition will occur quickly, as it ultimately did for shipping and containerisation.

Brilliant.
 

Curtain Twitcher, that is the most perfectly written post I’ve seen on here. Well said.

I admire peoples optimism about what technology can do but right now we are a long away from being able to build pilotless aircraft with anything like the reliability of current manned aircraft. For a start current AI systems work by feeding the computer millions of examples of what you what the computer to do and letting the system write its own code. From an aviation perspective a self written code with unknown failure points is just not going to pass any kind of certification. Only a couple of years ago Airbus issued an OEB that required pilots to manually turn off the Air Data Computers to force the aircraft into Alternate Law (direct control of the aircraft) in certain conditions to avoid an uncommanded dive. This is with a extremely mature design which is continuously updated and certified to current standards. Current aircraft have plenty of known and unknown bugs that require the pilot intervention. When Boeing and Airbus can fix those bugs and I don't have to do several manual computer resets in my working week, maybe they can begin to think about the other challenges of building a pilotless airliner.

Pilotless aircraft? I doubt it. People will always want a person to have “final say” - as others have pointed out, intercity trains still have drivers after all.

What will happen over the next (10+) years, is a transition to single pilot airliners. All the safety of “man-in-the-loop”, a halving of pilot salary costs (maybe more) and the punters will lap it up. Particularly when this gets approval.

https://news.sky.com/story/robot-co-...lator-10881082

www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/embraer-reveals-vision-for-single-pilot-airliners-343348/