Originally Posted by samc
I disagree with most of you about PFT.
1. No training is free- you either pay with time, or with money, either way its money.
2. People who are in a hurry to get to a regional are probably older (mid twenties), moving from one career to flying and want to catch up. Or they are people that incurr debt like every other college student in the country. Now, are all other industries suffering because of college graduates with student loans? Perhaps to some degree but not enough to force wages down to 15K.
3. Doing training in 90 days as opposed to two years doesn't have crap to do with quality of a pilot.
4. Having thousands of instructors running around instead of PFT people only means instruction fees will go down, there will be more students, then more pilots and there will still be pay problems at the regionals.
5. Even if regionals established a hard minimum they're still going to lose X number of pilots to better paying jobs every month. Where's the backfill going to come from? All the CFIs who've been making heaps of money and will only leave their instructing job for a 40K regional salary?
The only solutions I see are time and growth. Either way, good luck.
People who don't do PFT have several years of aviation work experience, ie they understand crappy pay and work rules, no benefits, and the eagerness of management to exploit young people who dream of airplanes. They have had enough and will try to avoid crappy regional airlines. Right now there are several crappy airlines which are having difficulty filling new hire classes because of their reputation on the street. I have a CFI friend who is holding out for SKW, despite easy opportunities at lesser companies.
PFT's, even if they somehow know better don't have any choice, they have to work for their affiliate carrier or go back to CFI school.
Maybe if we're lucky a few thousand micro-jets will drive up the demand for pilots significantly...and 300 hour wonders will NOT be flying microjets without a babysitter, unless the operators decide to save money by not buying insurance.
I suspect you have not had a lot of professional aviation experience...no amount of training can substitute for actual experience with conflicting pressures from safety, economics, MX, WX, customers, and the employer.