When it comes to the airlines, there shouldn't be an "industry" taking huge sums from trainees (or their parents) and putting them in the right-hand seat of an airliner after a couple of hundred hours of training. In my opinion, it should either be like the CTC of old with it's 3% acceptance rate, very high placement rate and available funding, or CAP 509-style with full airline funding. I think the demise of CAP 509 and the arrival of a 200 hour "aerial work" CPL replacing the old 700 hour one has dented T&Cs massively by flooding the supply side of the market, strengthening the demand side's hand massively.

As I've said on here many a time, I work on the railway. A few train train operating companies here in the UK have agreed to pay their off-the-street trainees the same (or nearly the same) salary as fully qualified drivers part-way through training. Why? There's a shortage of perennial shortage of drivers driven by the fact that all training must be done in-house, it gives the union a bit more bargaining power. A similar thing happened with newly qualified drivers at another place, shortage of instructors meaning training took longer, the union said, "well, you should be giving them back-pay once they qualify" and the company indeed did that. People were getting £30k payslips the month they got their key.

That's what you pilots could do if the supply/demand situation was in your favour. A lot of people have mentioned supply/demand situation in the US airline market context but wherever it favours the supply (employee) side, you're onto a winner!

Olympia463

You make some excellent points re the Air Force. I left UGSAS two years ago now, (we are now Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron) and everyone is required to sit the full 8-hour suite of aptitude tests at Cranwell in their first year - although it is not a requirement to pass to join the Sqn.
L3 airline academy? 45 minutes on a computer!

I accrued around 30 hours in the Grob with what I would describe as second to none quality instructors. Each with many years of Nimrod/Lightning/Tornado/Chinook flying under their belts. Day one taught to fly base on “feel” of the aircraft, set the throttle based on the engine noise, being able to tell if you are gaining altitude just by the horizon, etc .No looking at the instrument panel(other than for confirmation, of course!). You are flying an aircraft and using your natural senses to gauge control inputs. I am of course very grateful to start my flying career from the very best and I hope I do not forget all that they taught me!

I am now ending University and a looking for a career in Civilian flying and while I have total trust in the academies (L3 , CAE, FTE) I do think it’s unlikely the instruction will quite match my UGSAS days... but who knows?

But some airlines do still do this.

The airline I am most familiar with puts prospective recruits, even those already holding medicals, commercial licences and perhaps with thousands of mil/civvy hours through a selection processes that amongst many other things will involve a short assessment session in a simulator.

Further to that and also to answer LanceHudson's comment that:

Folks..at the risk of being controversial I'd make one observation...if say, the RAF or an airline is paying for some/all of an ab-initio's training right from day one then they are going to insist on some form of fairly rigorous screening prior to that training commencing because they are carrying all the financial risk if the student gets the "chop" (can we still use that term?) during the course.

If, OTOH, the student (or his/her parents) are carrying all the financial risk then the training organisation(s) might perhaps have a slightly different approach to aptitude tests.

I am going to be blunt but it seems that the traditionally decent employers do not have these issues (the odd one might slip through the net ofcourse) as they have decent packages and can pick and choose.
So maybe you should ask yourself: why do I work for such a crappy employer?*

But it seems like any thread on prune: “everything was better in the old days.” “The new generation is this and that...” Etc etc. But every generation has said that before you. We tend to romanticize when we think back.
We tend to forget that in the old days there were !!!!ty airlines with dubious practices as well..


for why t&c’s here are lacking behind the US:
airlines work in a single market but unions can not. Airlines are free to open AOC’s wherever they see fit and hire on different contracts while the unions can only look after the pilots in one country. We should have some sort of pan-european labour protection.

Indeed that is, in my view, the main problem. There is free movement for businesses, capital and, yes, labor, but not for unions. I tried to work with ECA for a while trying to push this forward with the EU, and it went nowhere. I know ECA is still somewhat on that case, but hugely sidetracked by the specific issues of ryanair and to some degree norwegian (not so much easyjet for some reason).

Now, labor laws are in general still a thing for each country and they do differ wildly, therefore of course union law does as well, as does the right for industrial action and so on. Unifying that means deciding on a common lowest denominator, and we currently see the discussion heating up in that area with the discussion about an EU wide minimum wage, which in my view is quite dangerous if it is not a percentage of the average or living wage but rather a fixed amount of money. Economies are still very different indeed within the EU, as re labor markets.

And that allows employers to exploit that, which some do, some not so much.

EU wide minimum wage would be a very bad idea indeed. You don’t even see that in the US. There should be legislation in place that if a union is acknowledged in one country it should automatically be acknowledged in all other member states. The ECA is, however a good initiative, still a toothless animal unfortunately...

I wish you well in your airline career. You certainly do not fit in to to the stereotype mentioned in so many posts.

The most important point you make relates to 'handling skills' which has to be a vital property of a pilot. When I was teaching gliding we used to blank off the instruments in the front seat on the flights just before we were thinking of sending someone solo. You only get one shot at landing a glider - there is no 'go around' available. Also flying at a club with many other gliders around, does wonders for your SA. And finally when you get to flying cross country, the skill of selecting a landing spot when you run out of lift has to be acquired. I believe that glider pilots who go on to power flying and airline flying have had a valuable introduction to real flying. Several people I sent solo flew in the RAF and a few with airlines.

There are P2F FO that cannot land a 737 with 2000 hours in calm winds cavok...just to give an idea of what is happening. Flying single pilot is almost the norm in certain outfit..problem is the captain also have 2500 hours TT.... and came from the same path. Definitely avoiding all ACMI charter and bottom feeder ..most of them from Eastern Europe
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Are these people given a routine, customary chance to fly the airplane ? And they don't show any improvement ?

It might not be enough, but it does exist.
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage

Just to digress and to interject a bit of (I think needed) balance into the thread, because I'm getting a bit uncomfortable with some of the stereotyping of "newbies" I am reading.

By way of background I'm a current Longhaul P1. My route to that seat was via a little gliding, then flying training in the RAF, fast jet tours, then CFS - student QFI/Basic FTS QFI and then later at CFS itself instructing instructors. After that and whilst in my mid-thirties I took the DEP route into an airline that selected and continues to select by way of a multi day selection procedure.

Nowadays in my day job I am increasingly working (both on the aircraft and in the simulator under test) alongside sub-thirty year old DEPs who prior to their previous airline were probably trained by the likes of CTC rather than the military... I have also sat on the jump seat recently (short haul) behind a very young cadet very new to the airline, early training done by CTC/L3.....

My perspective on this, FWIW, is that there are actually a lot of very good, very competent young pilots out there flying the line.

I accept I may be lucky in that the airline I work for weeds out the ham fisted slow thinking candidates during it's selection process... perhaps it would be helpful to find out where the outliers, the "2000 hours, can't land a 737/A320 pilots" are working and avoid those airlines...

Now, deep breath, back to the topic...

Make sure you mention this at your selection interview, as I'm sure with this attitude, your vast experience and your grand total of 30 hours they'll be able to learn an awful lot from you...

no wiggy. You work for an airline that empowers its first officers as captains in waiting. The airlines where to 2000 hour FO’s that can’t land in calm cavok, well we can imagine how their skippers threat their FO’s.

Fair point :ok: .

​​​​​​​I'm not sure this an entirely fair response. As I said, I fully trust the academies. If they were no good you would not be having the likes of BA/Virgin/easy taking their cadets. That's for sure. That being said, instructor retention is an issue these days (I was told by a representative at an L3 open day, so straight from the horses mouth) with many being straight out of flight training themselves. I never said I am experienced, but there is something to be said about spending 27 out of my 30 hours next to instructors on the complete opposite of the spectrum in terms of experience!

I apologise if my previous post was poorly worded and/or sounded like I have no respect for academies and their instructors. That is not the case and I am very much looking forward to starting my training with them and becoming the best aviator I can be. I cannot wait to be back in control of an aircraft, I have missed it dearly the past few years.

My response was slightly (very) tongue in cheek. I've had the pleasure of flying with people from the armed forces, academies and everything in between, I think where this thread falls short is people are generalising far too much, at both ends of the spectrum...

The ex military guys I've flown have been a mixed bag, some were great people and good pilots, others I wouldn't want to share a bag of crisps with, let alone a flight deck... just because someone has flown something fast and pointy doesn't necessarily mean they have the 'right stuff' in a commercial environment.... there are many transferrable skills that certainly hold merit, but conversely there are occasionally traits preferred by the military that make for a tough day out too. You can quite easily swop the words 'ex military' for 'academy students' without any real difference to my experience of the above. I have flown with cadets who were an absolute joy, and some who believed they were 'the chosen' with similar results to the above. I couldn't say who was better however, as to be quite honest I've met geniuses and idiots aplenty regardless of what 'group' they came from.

As for the aptitude tests, that only holds water so far, in the end they prove very little, but are just a hoop to whittle the numbers down... again I've flown with graduates from numerous schemes with various 'stages' of selection, and found it hard to believe in some instances that they could have been 'chosen' for anything. At the end of the day it boils down to the individual and their motivation, not the training organisations... the only caveat being that the industry at the moment has certainly made it possible due to BOMAD (bank of mum and dad) that anyone can turn up, regardless of ability, motivation OR personality and become a pilot... and herein lies the problem, they are making money, and even if a candidate is failing, that is a good thing as they will need to spend extra to get to the required standard, which equals profit for the organisation.

Want proof? CTC used to have a 3% pass rate at selection... which equaled max 3 people a month onto their ab initio course. what is it they take nowadays? 30-40 people? Either there has been a vast increase in applications or the bar has been lowered?

Ah! Wiggy you give yourself away! Fast jet flying must be the nearest thing to gliding I guess. Some years back after I had retired from flying gliders I met a fast jet pilot also long retired from the cockpit. We decided to see if flying was like roller skating something you never forget, and to do this cheaply we signed up for a week at our local gliding club. I went solo after about four trips mainly because I had never flown plastic gliders before, and they were much slippier than the wooden ones I was used to. My friend had several thousand hours in Sea Harriers some of them shooting down Argies in the Falklands. He went solo on the second day. I think that says it all for our handling skills, SA, and airmanship.