Originally Posted by
deltajuliet
Flight training expenses have gone up significantly and many of those old 135 jobs are almost impossible to find now, so it's not a fair comparison to bring up the old de facto mins.
No, they're not impossible to find by any means, you just need 1200 hours like always...and you need to be able to fly your way out of a wet paper bag too.
Originally Posted by
deltajuliet
The only reliable time building job these days is flight instructing, but you need more people on the bottom starting their training than at the top teaching for it to work. It's essentially a pyramid scheme, and I'm not sure we can sustain it. A big reason we've been able to so far is foreign students.
This is true in a sense but it's not a pyramid scheme exactly. It depends essentially on a five-for-one replacement. Each CFI needs 1500 hours...start with 300, so you need 1200 dual given. If each student needs about 200 hours dual, that's six CPL/CFI students to support one working CFI through 1500 hours. That's obviously not sustainable, and would only be temporarily viable during periods of massive regional hiring and interest in aviation careers (late 90's, early-mid 2000's?)
But foreign training demand isn't going away soon, and at least half of my dual given was for private, ie non-career, pilots.
The foreigners could take their training home, but in many cases it will always be cheaper to come to the US than to re-engineer their local regulations and build a non-existant GA infrastructure...we're not just talking about buying a few skyhawks, we're talking about building airports...
If the foreigners do go home and GA continues to wither, then the day may come where the airlines face a real pilot shortage. First they'll dramatically downsize the regionals; lifer captains will be unemployed because they have no one to sling gear for them. But since the whole point of regionals is cheap labor, the industry will not start subsidizing primary flight training just to keep regionals alive.
If there is ever actually a looming shortage of applicants for MAJOR airline jobs, then the majors will start looking at scholarships or even ab-initio type programs...but we're a very long way from that.
Originally Posted by
deltajuliet
As someone else pointed out, they'll start flying a widebody at 250 hours while you're still slaving away in a 172 with no air conditioning in the summer for minimum wage.
Google Air Crash Investigation...numerous episodes about recent crashes of non-US airliners due to basic airmanship issues.
Originally Posted by
deltajuliet
To add insult to injury, we're training our future competition.
They typically get paid more than we do. They're not going to competing with us any time soon as labor, although the quality product of some overseas carriers could attract international travellers who are fed up with the abuse of US majors.
Cabotage is not coming to the US in the foreseeable future, there are too many security concerns (some of which are legit).