There are unscrupulous operators who CHARGE inexperienced pilots to get experience (500 hours glass cockpit/jet/multi etc). Because most airlines these days want those kind of hours and already have the type rating before they will look at you and I despise them for that. If that sort of experience was necessary, Neil Armstrong and his colleagues would never have landed on the moon. It also insinuates that less experienced pilots or non type rated pilots are more likely to have an accident or incident, which is hogwash as we have seen with some recent crashes.
There is also a queue of youngsters that will pay for their own training and then fly for peanuts. Behind them are more youngsters that will fly for even less. Glad I’m an engineer!
Rgds Cking
Sorry Ralph, but there’s only one section of society to blame for this, and that is the pilots/students/cadets themselves. 99.99% of things we do in life is optional, and that includes prostituting yourself just to fly an aeroplane. Unfortunately in America it took the crash of the Colgan Q400 to bring about a legislation change in hiring practices and quite frankly Europe needs to adopt a similar tact before there’s a smoking hole on one of our doorsteps. The issue is that America has the General Aviation infrastructure to cope with the 1500hr rule, Europe does not. However that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a limit. We should adopt the old 700hr CPL rule, that would be a start. Unfortunately for the UK in particular we suffer from the European free labour laws which is a by-product of being in the Eurozone. No matter how many UK citizens decide not to undertake training, there’s a plethora of cadets that walk around like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AOfbnGkuGc that are flocking to the UK to fill the gaps. Cking alludes to it above, the wannabe gravy train will stop at nothing to fly aeroplanes and it’s no wonder airlines are offering pathetic contracts, I don’t blame them one bit. If everyone turned down the contracts then there is only one way they’d have to go, that’s upwards. It’s simple economics. Why do you pay 3 x the price for your roses on valentine’s day? Because us dumb humans are prepared to pay it. Why does a cup of tea cost 3 x the normal amount in a service station? Because us dumb humans are prepared to pay it. The airlines are doing nothing wrong, blame the cadets who will stop at nothing to fly aeroplanes. I’ll give you another example: this is a statistic given to me on a pprune seminar a few years ago: In an average hiring year in the UK there are around 250-300 new jobs available. In the same average year there are about 1200 new CPL/IRs issued every year. So even in good times there’s around 900 pilots who will never, ever realise their “dream” (I use this term loosely) and sit in the right seat of an airliner. During the longest and deepest global recession and banking crisis in living memory the flight schools were still full up. What does this tell you about the state of this industry today? It tells me everything. I can tell this forum some horror stories about what goes on in the UK, but I won’t. One thing is for certain though, and that is this industry has had it.
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