Hah: Qatar Airways Is Trying To Poach Airberlin Pilots

This is not even a debate. US pilots are THE standard. The US military produces the finest pilots in the world, and everyone knows that. If you argue with that assertion, you are wrong.

OSM Aviation, the recruitment company working with Norwegian, is actually having a "roadshow" in Berlin on August 24th as well.

This is easy to resolve, what are the actual salary figures for the major global carriers? Why not just list em?

@No Name, Your first point is accurate. As I stated, the US military is fortunate to have many resources available. This starts with airspace and funding, then continues with airports, aircraft, simulators, maintenance, et al. While weather, in its own right might not be a resource, having enough landmass so that you can train where the weather is good is. For US military pilots, access to these resources doesn't stop when they graduate from pilot training, meaning years of the best training opportunities not constrained by external factors. Regarding the Saudi training question, the following statement was from August 16th. "Today, #Laughlin hosted Royal Saudi Air Force Maj. Gen. Khalid Mohammed Al Saqally, who traveled from Saudi Arabia to visit base leadership and Saudi Arabia's future pilots!" They do also have a BAE contract to train in Kingdom as you pointed out. Many countries have some organic training capacity. It is generally the best, or best connected, students who are selected for training in the US. Is that because it is inferior? Again, you are correct about the weather being a significant factor in the civil aviation equation. But you failed to point out that it is also prohibitively expensive in Europe and many other parts of the world. That opens up many more opportunities to US pilots to build their experience with good continuity of effort, meaning less fits and starts or degradation of skills along the way. @Bobby T is partially correct about the housing allowance amount for a Capt. His maths go awry when he adds Capt. housing allowance to FO salary with FO housing allowance already incorporated. Per the EK recruiting website: FO total monthly salary: 44,450 AED tax-free (Accommodation allowance included) Capt total monthly salary: 58,770 AED tax-free (Accommodation allowance included) If they do have room on the compound your salary will decrease by $17k-19K per annum. As for education, the value is highly subjective. It is free in the US, so you have to value the experience of an international school and its curriculum in order to count this as a positive. Even then the benefit is only maximized if you have three children. If you don't live on the compounds and you get the maximum allowance, you are likely looking at a flat between 1400-2000 square feet. Admittedly, that is bigger than you could find a few years ago thanks to the steadily dropping rental prices portending the inevitable Dubai housing bubble burst (accumulating asset opportunity). But also, keep in mind that most American families are not accustomed to living in dense urban areas as many Europeans are, thus moving into something even as small as a 2000 square foot flat would be a significant shock. As long as we are on this train of thought, in the US and with many overseas carriers you can commute to work. This allows employees to live wherever they want. That isn't possible with the ME3 at the moment. If it was, it might change the calculus for some US pilots. Especially those who aren't sure about committing to moving their family to Dubai indefinitely. @No Name, thanks for the logical discussion. @BobbyT, I like that you ended on such a positive note. You're amazing too...at maths! JK. Good night.

@PointPilot Quite frankly the more I dig into your claims the more ridiculous they seem. The Singapore Air Force does basic flight training in Australia on the Pilatus PC-21 followed by M-346 jet training in France. Convention training to the F-16 and F-15 is done in the US. And the Japanese seems to have over 200 trainers on their own Quite frankly your gold standard of training seems to consists of Northern European countries that either have too small armed forces to train at home or simply not enough room, or countries that send pilots with probably 300+ Hours to do conversion training on US built front line fighter jets. Quite frankly training on how to use a front line fighter is probably part of the sales package when a fighter is sold in most cases. Buy an F-15 or F-16, go train in the US. Buy an Saab Gripen, go train in Sweden.