It was brutal: No job and no income. I was losing my mind a bit. But I was luckier than some...
on day one of his first full-time job outside aviation last May, Mr Jones spent most of his shift cutting lengths of elastic for NHS face masks.
He was the new boy at Dum-fries-based PPE producer Alpha solway, earning slightly above minimum wage and living in his father’s house a few miles away in the town of Moffat.
Three months earlier, home was Athens, he was a first officer with Aegean Airlines and flying to destinations across Europe.
‘it does feel like a bit of a hit,’ he said as he contemplated his changed circumstances.
‘i guess it makes you take stock a wee bit and think, “This is a bit different”.’
The Heriot-Watt mechanical engineering graduate had dreamed from an early age of becoming an rAF or royal navy pilot. But after a knee injury barred him from military service, he focused on civil aviation.
The cost of training would have been prohibitive without paren-tal help. He said: ‘Luckily, when i was at university, we sold a big-ger house and moved to a smaller one and my father decided to use a big chunk of that money to put me through training.’ over 15 months at the flying school in Jerez de la Frontera in southern spain, Mr Jones sat nearly 20 theory and flight exams at a cost of some £82,000.
it was another £30,000 to train on the Airbus for his first job with easyJet, based in Berlin.
From there he moved to Aegean as a contractor – until, 15 months later, the pandemic struck.
in mid-March he learned he was on unpaid leave and, days after flying home to the uK as much of Europe locked down, his contract was terminated.
‘it was fairly brutal, really,’ he said. ‘i went through almost all of the first lockdown with no job, no income. i couldn’t be furloughed, obviously, because i was literally unemployed.
‘i was just living back at home with my dad, and towards the end of that first lockdown i was beginning to lose my mind a wee bit, bouncing off the walls.’
Contributing to the national war effort against coronavirus was a welcome relief – even if his early tasks were largely menial.
since then he has moved up the ranks and drawn on his pilot’s expe-rience to write standard operating procedure documents for the firm’s machinery and become a jack of all trades in the business. There have been a couple of pay rises, too.
‘i’m lucky in that i’m unmar-ried and i don’t have children,’ he said. ‘i don’t have a house or a mortgage. i know a lot of guys who do have a mortgage and do have kids and suddenly have lost all that income.’
in time, Mr Jones has no doubt, there will be a route back into the job he loves. That is why he paid £1,000 in november to sit a simulator test and revalidate his Airbus licence.