The PFT issue does have some gray areas and to some among us the penumbra is very wide and gets wider with each day.
I’ve always understood PFT as simply one who buys a seat, essentially pays money to occupy the right seat. Not someone who pays for required training just to meet FAA or general job qualifications.
Pay For Training is misleading to some; it should be Pay For Occupation or something (more) catchy.
I attended a big aviation university and achieved my ratings along with my degree, my parents like many others saved for me to go to college and it was I who chose to go there.
What I did is not PTF and for someone to try to draw that distinction tells me a lot about them, either sour a old curmudgeon who lost a job and now is blaming anything and everything for it or just a plain ole idiot.
I’ve actually met people, although few, who think that you should not have to pay/buy any ratings beyond the CMEL, that if someone wants to hire you as an instructor that they should pay for the CFI and so forth. That type of thinking is extreme but it is there and it gets worse because there are people who will buy the privileges to sit right seat in a Cessna 402 or BE1900 for 200 or 250 hours of “SIC time”.
These last types of people do PFT and do take a paying job off the market when they perform such acts. These people should be shamed just as much as union scabs should they are no less hurting the industry as a whole.
It is expected and really required for parents nowadays to save and help pay for college, even if you plan to join the military you still have to get a degree.
PFT and Pay For College and Ratings are two entirely different things.
-R
