The Expendable New-hire

One of my friends from work got "tentatively" hired on as an FO at PSA about five months ago. He had about four hundred hours total with around 85 multiengine hours, but he had some glass cockpit experience which his interviewer found desireable. At that time, PSA's published hiring minimums were 600 total time and 100 multi, so it was a pretty big deal when they even gave him a second look, much more so when they offered him a deal. His interviewer told him that PSA would hire him if he passed a jet transition course from ATP, a Jacksonville, FL based flight school renowned for its accelerated pilot training.

having returned from this interview, he asked me what I recommended that he should do. I told him that I thought that it would be a better idea to use that 6k for getting his initial CFI and thereby earning a permanent license that he could use for the rest of his life as a safety net, should he need it later to earn a living. "Besides," I told him, "you will get the jet training for free when you get hired on at the regionals."

"Yeah, but time is money. If I can get into a regional now, I'll be better off later on by being higher up on the seniority list," said he.

"Well, its your money. I just think that its an awfully large gamble for some training that you will eventually get while on someone else's payroll. You really should get your CFI for those furloughs that you will ineviably face at some time in your career."

He didn't take my advice. I dont blame him for it, either. PSA had a carrot infront of him and he had a wife and some student loans to take care of, and he wasn't going to make ends meet scrubbing down dirty airplanes for the next year. He got a loan and was off the jacksonville for the following week.

He came back with a plethora of knowledge about the CRJ (canadair regional jet) and its systems. If you had a question about anything jet related, he was the go-to guy. ATP certainly did its job, and I thought that he was going to be sitting right seat in a jet within a month. He faxed his certificate of course completion to PSA's recruiting office and got no reply. He emailed his interviewer, made phone calls, did everything but send smoke signals... but got no answer from his PSA contact. Finally, some weeks after his graduation from ATP, he got a call from recruiting telling him that they had suspended hiring. The call ended with the standard, but always cordial: "Thank you for your interest in PSA."

And that was that. He didn't get the job even though he had upheld his end of their deal. He started off as a commercial pilot with multiengine and instrument ratings and ended up right back where he started, but now with an additional $6000 dollars in debt and nothing to show for it but a turbine transition course diploma that was worth no more to him than the paper it was printed on. I havent heard back from him about where he went from there, but I don't think that he landed a job at an airline any time soon, considering the current state of the economy, the extension of the mandatory retirement age to 65, and oil prices on the rise.

I've never seen an industry so bereft of respect towards human beings as the airline industry. Another friend of mine was hired by a different airline, maybe TSA or Express Jet, and spend thousands relocating his family to attend ground school. During the first week of training, the director of recruiting walked into the classroom and told them all that their class had been cancelled due to "unforseen financial reasons." He told the new hires that their resumes were still on file and that they would be contacted to join a future class at an unknown time in the future.

Put youself in these people's shoes for a moment. You just quit your job, moved out of your apartment, dragged your family across the country, and moved into a town where you didnt know a single soul so that you could take the next step in your aviation career. You footed the bill for the deposit on a new apartment or the down payment on a new home, not to mention the travel expenses and lost time at your previous job. All of these new-fires were now out of work, no plan b, and maybe with no way to get back home without help from family or personal loans. This friend of mine returned broke and defeated to his cubicle next to mine in the CFI office a few days later.

Believe it or not, I actually have other examples of good pilots hired and then let go for poor reasons, or for no reasons at all. To keep it simple, another CFI friend of mine was fired from training just for being in the room when his sim-partner failed a checkride... he never got a chance to take his own checkride.

It seems that when airlines forsee a need for new pilots, they are quick to hire them in droves with no real thought to whether they will actually need so many of them once they finish their training- leading them to terminate some if not all of them before they even finish ground school.