Originally Posted by
Duksrule
Agreed. Plus now that you will have to have 1500 hours to get a seat in an airliner, I can see flight training dropping off. Back when you had a decent chance of being hired if you made it through your ratings and got to 500 hours people still wanted to start training. At 1500 hours though that carrot will be way to far away. When new students shrink so will the need for CFIs. Traffic watch is almost a thing of the past now. Banner towing is getting a bit harder to break into and most survey companies want 500-1000 hours to get into the door. The traditional low time jobs are drying up. Unless you have a bunch of rich kid that can go buy a 1000 hours it may end up being a shortage at some point.
This is the biggest issue right here.
There are fewer time building jobs all around. The number of students has really dropped off in the last ten years, and continues to drop off. Also, the number of people looking to get only private/instrument has fallen off drastically with $6/gal 100LL. So now the instructing profession is like a ponzi scheme. For an instructor to get 1500 hours they are virtually going to have to take 10 other pilots from 0 hours through commercial. Then those 10 wet commercials need another 100 pilots to get themselves up to ATP mins... It is unsustainable. Not to mention, getting 500 hours of 50nm cross country is going to be quite a feat for most people doing most traditional time-building jobs.
Fortunately for me, I'll be close to ATP mins by the time the law goes into effect, but for any wet commericals/CFI's the low-time job market is going to become completely stagnant.
My only personal concern is about the new ATP training that was discussed in the NPRM. It appeared that the ATP cert was going to require quite a few hours of high level (expensive) sim time, and was going to be way more involved than just buying some hours in a light twin and taking a checkride (which is already pretty expensive). I'm not sure I'll be able to swing it on my CFI pay if I have to drop another $5,000-$10,000 +++ on my own flight training in order to go to the airlines.