Captain Evan Cullen:

I shall deal with the jobs opportunity and the position of the Irish Aviation Authority. Mr. Philip von Schöppenthau of the European Cockpit Association in Brussels will deal with the technical aspects of EASA.

With regard to the jobs opportunity, unfortunately, the vast majority who want to do what we do in Ireland need €100,000 for basic training and a further €30,000 to obtain a simple rating on a Boeing 737 or A320 jet aircraft. A significant feature of the Irish Aviation Authority's meeting with the committee was concern about what had happened in Waterford. The authority described what was occurring as a Ponzi scheme. What is regrettable about what happened in the school in Waterford is that it is not the first time it has happened. It is the third time, but nothing has been done about it. In the 1990s there was a school of aviation in Cork. A young pilot whose parents had remortgaged their house handed over £38,000 to start his training, but the school went bankrupt the following day and he did not get back one penny of the money. There were similar stories in Waterford last year when students were left high and dry. I do not know why young people are being exposed to this and why there is not more regulation and oversight to ensure they are not exploited.

There are students who will not make it through the course. There seems to be no rule stipulating that a school which is taking money from students must tell students their chances of making it through training. All the schools want is the money, as dreadful as that sounds.

Traditionally, becoming a pilot involved a different process. The three pilots present were cadets. We were selected through a programme in third level colleges and then went through a cadetship with one of the airlines. That system is no longer in place. The other source of pilots at the time was the military. Since the end of the Cold War, some of the military training budgets for pilots have been slashed by 98%. One can imagine what that did to the flow of pilots from the military sector into the commercial sector. The current trend involves self-sponsored young people using money derived from parents' mortgages. On qualifying, they proceed to airlines and are paid little or no salary as they operate as co-pilots.

The issue of the home base arises. Many of the young pilots are told from week to week that they are operating from a different airport. The current rule allows for the airline to define its new home base on a weekly basis. Therefore, it does not have to provide hotel or subsistence accommodation. It would be like telling Members of the Dáil that their home base would be Brussels for one week and that, as a consequence, they would not have to be provided with a hotel, expenses or a flight, and that at the end of the week the home base would again be Dublin. In the aviation industry this happens to young people weekly. They have already had to go to the banks and their parents for €130,000. They have no permanency of place. This practice is rampant in the industry, particularly in Ireland.