Originally Posted by
The Dominican
It is not about it being a good practice or not, it is about it being necessary or not. Supply and demand and of course cost is what determines if ab initio programs are rule or exception, many airlines world wide hire personnel directly from high school and they look for the right person first and teach them how to fly later but these airlines are not as concerned about the cost of training of an individual as much as they are in hiring an individual with the right attitude and social demeanor to keep for an expand of 40 years. Training at these airlines are equivalent to college degrees and they are in training for 4 years before they even join the line, first they go through all their ratings and turbine transition and after that is when they join the actual academy (at about 400 to 500 hours) where they will spend the next 3 years learning the operation and doing hundreds of simulator hours before they even fly the actual airplane on the line, while all along earning their entire salary as a first officer and not some reduced training salary.
This would be entirely acceptable, and has various benefits...
- Reasonable compensation. If they expect you to focus on an intensive multi-year program they will have to pay enough for you to live on from day one, or at least provide room, board, and allowance.
- Airline sponsored ab-initio programs would be highly appealing to young people, and would attract top talent. This would improve the "gene pool" of the airlines.
- Kids with options in life will not put up with too much BS, at least not for long. This would spell the end of airline's supplementing their payrolls with food stamps.
- You could get them educated about and involved in a union early on.
- They would have an incentive to see their airline succeed long-term.
Possible downsides...
- Book smarts and street smarts are two different things, and pilots need some of both. It's easy to screen for the former, not so much the later. You could work around this by placing recruiting emphasis on team sports players, kids with a PPL, etc.
- We would lose the benefit we get from having a lot of General Aviation depth in the airline biz. This is irrelevant in most countries where the military and airlines are the only things which get to fly (other than a few millionaires with toys), but GA is very significant here in the US. For this reason I think the airlines should continue to hire as many GA and military pilots as possible.
Also I think in the US you would need a college degree before entering such a program. We have a slightly different mentality on that compared to Europe.