Sure. But our profession is more complicated than medicine, lots of unpredictability and uncertainty... if you go down the medical road, you're going to end up in a good place one way or another. But if a young person (or potential career changer) talks to career airline pilots, they'll get mixed reviews at best, largely due to past instability.

Law is more like airlines, lower barriers to entry but also hard to make it to the top tier. For every major firm partner, there are 1000 junior associates putting in 80 hour weeks, and public defenders and strip mall ambulance chasers who qualify for food stamps.

When I was mentioning ab initio as a solution, I was speaking from the POV of the people who have the problem: airlines.

I'm not advocating that pilot groups/unions should be facilitating or encouraging paid training pipelines (it's out of our hands regardless, since union jurisdiction only extends back to day one of indoc). Although at some point if growth (or negative growth) gets bad enough due to pilot shortage, we might actually have an incentive to help generate new pilots.