Low-cost airlines may have flightcrew now, but "the pool of trained pilots will reduce much faster than airlines realise", says Flight Training Europe (FTE) managing director Peter Sadler. He predicts that the ab initio airline training market will recover to viability within one to two years.
Sadler, the head of a team that led the management buy-out of the former BAE Systems Flight Training at Jerez, Spain in December, had based his business plan on the assumption that the training famine would continue for up to two years, but now he says he has become more optimistic than that. Sadler says that his main source of business is self-sponsored students.
Sadler believes the motivation for unsecured self-sponsorship will fall as soon as the traditional airlines re-enter the graduate flightcrew market, although he does not see European airlines ever returning to pure cadetship schemes. Flight training consultant Peter Moxham says that the average age of ab initio training applicants today is 25-26. It used to be 19-20.
DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Source: Flight International
