Australia will apparently relax visa rules for foreign pilots due to a pilot shortage, according to this article
Maybe there are opportunities for pilots who are searching for airline jobs? The article mentions"senior pilots" though so they are probably looking for experienced/unfrozen ATPLs.
Australia has a long history of adjusting its entry requirements according to their varying labour requirements. A very smart policy which is politically very incorrect in the “old world” 
It is possible (again) to get pilots on a 457 visa, but the company will need to prove they can’t find Australians who want to work in the remote area where the job is based.
Australia is big and not everyone wants a certain job.
I was talking to a Europe based CPL/IR recently and he reckons that, with several airlines here having gone bust or are about to, spilling out tons of qualified pilots into the market, the European pilot shortage is largely fiction now and like to remain fiction for ever since the forecasts are basically bogus.
So pilots may have to relocate much further away.
Doesn’t an airline going bust only mean it will get taken over, whole or in parts, by surviving ones? Kind of like Air Berlin got split up between Lufthansa and EasyJet, I think.
Indeed, but there are only so many passengers. The airlines which went bust blamed brexit but everybody blames brexit They went bust because of loads of empty seats. I just don’t believe that European passenger numbers are going to keep rising. To make money on short haul you need to get something like €200 for every seat, on average, so for the average couple it is €800 to go somewhere. Any significant holiday is a few k… You can run a TB20 for the cost of four ski holidays
The growth will be in formerly poor countries which are getting rich and where people like to flaunt their money – starting with China.
Europe will never have a shortage as long as you can go from flight school straight into the right seat of a 737 with 250hrs MCL. Plus there’s no other GA around that compete for those candidates: you either go to airlines or nothing – there is nothing else. Not like you can fly cancelled checks at night in a beat up Commander 500B, or FedEx Caravans.
The 90% take up rate for integrated fATPL pilots continues from my experience (actually only around 200 hours to a FO position unless the MCC/JOC is in a full motion approved jet simulator, and then closer to 250 hours).
I agree with Peter’s assessment. If there had been a real shortage of pilots then wages would have gone up significantly or training costs would have been borne more by the airlines themselves than they are now.
German media are reporting a “Fachkräftemangel” (skilled labour shortage) for years now but wages have not risen significantly along with these reports, so you can tell they are bogus. If something really is in short supply in a market economy, then someone wanting to buy it has to pay a lot more than before…
AdamFrisch wrote:
Europe will never have a shortage as long as you can go from flight school straight into the right seat of a 737 with 250hrs MCL
You still need a captain with lots more experience, and that’s the main problem perhaps. The airlines hire fresh pilots to thin out the experienced crew, but they are still worth zero because they add workload to the experienced crew and the airline in general. It’s a long term process.
