Grounding Foreign Pilots

[arctic ocean]

So SW/CJ hire Canadian pilots for 6 months - training bond? For how long? The winter season goes by, the inevitable layoff happens. Then WJ or AC gets their hire on and a bunch of guys join up. Now SW/CJ in the fall are not back to doing recurrents, they're hiring off the street again. Meanwhile, at the bottom and the middle end of things, small and medium sized operators across the country are burning up thier meagre profits training the turnover every six months. Who suffers then? Small to medium size charter companies and the communities they serve. And of course the new pilots fresh out of training cause they have nowhere to go.

There's a pilot shortage coming - all you have to do is look at the forecasts. Most guys in the last 50 years in this country have got big iron on their ticket if they wanted it. The job numbers as they relate to these foreign pilots is a ripple.

If the cost of operating airlines from north to south gets too high, the option for the tour operators may be to start from the other end. So maybe the foreign pilots we see in Canada will be in their own airplanes from Mexico, the DR, Cuba........

[richardhead]

Anybody ever ask the foreign pilots what they think. After all, Canadian pilots do go over there in the summer.

[ant_321]

I didn't have time to read all the posts so somebody else has probably posted something similar. I consider myself a very open minded person but with such a high supply and such a low demand for pilots it just makes no sense to let foreigners flood the market. This doesn't just happen at the airline level, I see it happening all the way down to the smaller operations and even FTU's. To me it makes no sense.

P.S. This is a little bit of a touchy subject to me as I just had an immigrant with near identical experience get hired over me recently.

[ahramin]

Unfortunately we are very unlikely to see any change in government policy on this issue. The Harperland government couldn't care less, and when ALPA went before the senate they managed to say that we have a looming pilot shortage and we have too many foreign pilots at the same time. Pretty much killed any credibility we had on either issue.

The labour minister got away with allowing Sunwing and Canjet to hire foreign pilots because there aren't any qualified pilots in Canada while Dave Proban at Westjet says he has 5000 resumes from qualified pilots on his desk and hires 10 of them a month.

As for public opinion, everyone loves their cheap vacations and this isn't going to change.

[North Shore]

So SW/CJ hire Canadian pilots for 6 months - training bond? For how long? The winter season goes by, the inevitable layoff happens. Then WJ or AC gets their hire on and a bunch of guys join up. Now SW/CJ in the fall are not back to doing recurrents, they're hiring off the street again. Meanwhile, at the bottom and the middle end of things, small and medium sized operators across the country are burning up thier meagre profits training the turnover every six months. Who suffers then? Small to medium size charter companies and the communities they serve. And of course the new pilots fresh out of training cause they have nowhere to go.

Why not make your company an attractive place to work, by paying out the money that you would spend on initials in salary? Similar to the airtanker world, keep 'em busy in the winter, and pay them well enough that they don't go looking elsewhere in the summer. Seems a better solution than the revolving door that you describe above.
This solution:

the option for the tour operators may be to start from the other end. So maybe the foreign pilots we see in Canada will be in their own airplanes from Mexico, the DR, Cuba......

would really suck on a bunch of levels...