Planning ahead...

[RudeNot2]

Hi everyone..

I am currently progressing - albeit slowly - through the PPL(A) and I am thinking towards the future and what I should aim for.

My current thinking is to do some meaningful hour building after gaining the PPL - flights across the water to France etc and hopefully time in the States / Canada to gain all essential experience.

To progress further (I am not particularly interested in airline work) I was thinking of the CPL and the FI rating to be able to charge people for "Pleasure" rides / training or if the opporunity arose / was searched for a short haul cargo type position.

What are your views on this and the time / training required??

Any advice appreciated...

Dave

[3FallinFlyer]

I have thought about this, but although I concluded that I like to fly and go places, I decided that FI work would quickly lose its appeal for me if it wasn't leading somewhere i.e. hours building for an aviation career. I enjoy teaching people, but sitting in the right hand seat going round and round the same local area and circuit on good days while watching the rain fall outside and not earning on bad days, You can keep it...

Now FI's flame away... I'm ready!

[BroomstickPilot]

RudeNot2

My advice, through bitter experience, is to say don't do the CPL under any circumstances whatsoever: do the ATPL.

The CPL only has nine papers, (compared to the ATPL's 14) but you are actually examined in 13 (yes, thirteen) subjects within those nine papers.

Let me explain the implications of this. Let's take an example, Navigation. In the ATPL, General Navigation and Radio Navigation are two entirely separate papers each with, I suppose, 70 odd questions in the exam for each subject: a total of about 140 questions in which to demonstrate your knowledge. Clearly, it is possible to pass one and fail the other. If you fail one, you only have to revise the one you failed for your next attempt.

CPL Navigation is one paper that embraces both General and Radio Navigation, but you still only get, say 70 questions within which to demonstrate your knowledge; half the number you get in the ATPL. The syllabus for CPL Navigation covers at least 85%, if not more of the ATPL syllabus for both General and Radio Navigation. The only things omitted in the CPL are Polar Stereographic charts and Grid Navigation.

Since the pass mark is 75% in all papers, you don't have to get many questions wrong in the CPL to fail effectively two subjects. This means you will have to revise both for your next attempt.

The Central Question Bank comprises a body of questions of which 85% are perfectly fair and reasonable. The remaining 15% are split equally between complete 'no brainers' and questions that require a depth of understanding far beyond anything that any commercial pilot needs for operational purposes.

Questions are selected for inclusion in the paper by some kind of random selection process, so by sheer luck you can get either several 'no brainers' or several excessively difficult questions. The proportion that these make up of the whole can dramatically alter your chances of passing as the more difficult questions can carry two marks. Remember, 75% is a pass, 74% is a fail.

I think you can see that even if you have genuinely done the work, just a few of those excessively difficult questions could scupper your chances of passing, and then you have to revise the whole of two subjects all over again in order to repeat one paper. I found that this made the CPL far trickier (notice I say trickier, not more difficult) to pass than the ATPL!

Add to this the fact that CPL exams are only held once every eight weeks, while ATPL exams are held every 28 days, but you still have to complete all your passes within six sittings over eighteen months. Actually, the CAA hang onto the exam results for some days before notifying them to candidates, so that you miss the closing date for examination entries for the next examination for subjects you have just attempted. But with ATPL, at least you have the option of taking different subjects at the next available examination date if you wish.

Think carefully before you go for CPL.

Broomstick.

[S-Works]

Broomstick, I think you are being a bit melodramatic there!!

I took the CPL/IR exams over a 12 month period and passed the lot first time and I have a brain the size of a pea! None of it is difficult just very time consuming. I also used the JAR question bank "Exam 8.0" from Germany (was in German but now available in English as V10.0) which has all the questions in it for revision.

If you have no desire to fly a chav liner or even work as a pilot the CPL takes up far less of your life than the ATPL exams. I have no intention of doing a CPL licence, I just did them while I was doing the IR stuff to see if I could do it.

So if you do not want to work for an airline ever then the CPL exams are easier and less time consuming.

[Mercenary Pilot]

Your missing an important point BroomstickPilot. If you dont get an Instrument Rating within 3 years, you lose the ATPL credit anyway. If you plan to use an IR commercially, it will need to be a Multi Engine IR. ME/IR will add between £12000-£18000 to your training costs.

RudeNot2
You need to decide exactly what you want to do with your flying career and also what your budget will stretch too. :ok:

[IO540]

I should add there are very few scenarios where a CPL (or an ATPL) is of any value whatsoever without working in an AOC context.

The only one I can think of, off hand, is being a paid company pilot (i.e. it's in your contract that you have to fly). Some others are perhaps charity flights beyond a certain radius or something like that....

The reason for doing a CPL/IR over a PPL/IR (JAA) is that there is very little difference in the amount of junk one has to swat up, so one may as well do the CPL. Never know what grandfather privileges or whatever one might get in umpteen years' time.

With the FAA IR there is a lot less reason for a CPL. You have close to zero chance of getting UK Govt permission to do sub-airline-level commercial work in an N-reg plane (AOC or not), though the "company pilot" case probably still applies. On the other hand the FAA CPL ground school is pretty reasonable (I've just done it) so the CPL is still probably worth doing (over the PPL) just in case it gives some extra conversion privileges if/when EASA deliver on their pretty amazing public statements that they want to be able to exchange an FAA IR for a JAA IR (an essential step as part of their longer term objective of kicking out all foreign-reg planes out of the EU)...

[RudeNot2]

Thanks for the replies guys..

I will continue as I am for the time being and work on the hours after the PPL has been gained and then decide on the appropriate route.

Dave

[BroomstickPilot]

Bose-x,

First of all, I must appologise for not responding to your comment on my post before now. My computer has been sick and I have thus been 'off the air' for a couple of days.

I should be very interested to hear whether the German questionbank you used held the actual questions used in the CPL. At the time I took the CPL exams, which was in 2003/4, JAA were still trying to keep the content of the question bank secret. Students in Denmark and Belgium were in process of forcing their hand by making them publish it in Denmark and Belgium under the freedom of information acts in those two countries, but we never got to see the real questions here in the UK and at first had to make do with bootleg feedback questions from unofficial sources.

An on line questionbank did become available during that time, which I did use, called 'Abacus', but at the time this only claimed to offer 'JAA-like' questions, and not the real thing.

Apart from that, all I can point to is the fact that some people seem to be able to pass exams without too much difficulty and some don't. Why this should be may be partly to do with the personality of the individual, although I suspect other factors may be at work also. Sadly, I belong to the latter category. The one thing I do notice is that the people who pass exams consistently always claim not to be clever!!!

Joking aside, however, the purpose of our responding to RudeNot2's post has been to try to help him/her on the basis of our own experiences. Your experience of the CPL exams has been good: mine has been bad. RudeNot2 needs to hear all shades of opinion to help him/her to come to a decision whether to proceed with CPL or not.

However, what I say about the nature of the CPL exams is, I truly believe, fact.

Best regards,

Broomstick.

[jerezflyer]

I for one have a very clear idea as to why I have started a CPL groundschool course as opposed to an ATPL. I am a 36 y/o PPL and aspire to become a flying instructor and instruct part time at weekends along side my current career as a project manager.

No pressure with 36 month expiry for an expensive IR/ME and no guarantee of a career changing job at the end of it anyway. After much thought, instructing part time and the odd pleasure flight as a CPL is the way for me....
just my thoughts.....