I have noticed in the previous few days a lot of activity on here regarding BAA Training, mainly from fellow colleagues at the school unhappy with the situation there. I have experenced the school for a while now and believe I can give good insight into how things are ……‘falling apart’.
To start with the things that are good with BAA…..
- The buildings in Vilnius are nice, clean and modern
- There is a foosball table and water machines
- The Head of Ground school (Peter) is one of the nicest people you will meet
As you can see, BAA have all the important aspects of running a flight school covered
, so lets talk about things which are not so good.
- Instructors - I cannot say the same about every instructor but there are a large number of theoretical instructors who are not very good at what they teach or have very little experience in what they teach. BAA do not care, they pay instructors very little and refuse to get good permanent instructors as they come with additional cost. Do they care that the instructor cannot speak English, NO. Do they care that most of the instructors that come from Soviet backgrounds teach their old and inefficient methods, NO (I think all students know who I am meaning) We had one instructor who was ‘fired’ for being so bad (although he reappeared like some sort of magic trick as a flight instructor 6 months later), I believe another instructor was fired for being an alcoholic (something which I sympathise with, as I also need a lot of alcohol when dealing with BAA)
- Organisation & Planning – There is none, although according to management “this is how it will be in you’re airline jobs” a phrase all students have heard. Can you imagine it, getting told you are flying to Los Angeles, 7 hours before departure when you’re a captain at Lufthansa. According to BAA, this is how it is.
There were days during our ground school, where we finished at 10PM and started at 7:30AM the next morning as they had to split the entire ground school students into Day (7 - 2:30) and Evening (3 - 10) classes as they didn’t have enough classrooms to satisfy their overcapacity. We also had 1.5 days to learn Flight Operations, but that did not matter as BAA gave us our school test based entirely on the introduction chapter of Ops (I think points may have been given for spelling our name correctly as nobody failed). Time off for CAA, in 9 months of groundschool, we had 1 week off, after our first 3 subjects. This meant a lot of other subjects were missed when students had to take additional time off for CAA. I missed an entire topic on Flight Planning, although taking CAA exams, wasn’t a good enough reason for missing school according to management. We were offered another week off between 22ndDecember – 4thJanuary. Offered a week off by BAA management, in time designated for our Christmas holidays. Merry Christmas, here are you´re presents and you can open them after you’ve gone to your Meteorology exam. Not that it mattered anyway as the CAA system was down for the entire Christmas period meaning anyone who did stay, couldn’t go to their exams.
- Flying Season - Spain base has been a total disaster for BAA so far. Flight Instructors are leaving almost instantly. IFR aircraft took nearly 5 weeks longer than planned to arrive, leaving many students just wasting money away. Spain was almost sold to everybody as though it was package holiday, all-inclusive to Spain…Sun, Sea, Good Weather all year round with nice beaches and that BAA was doing everyone a favour by sending people down there. What BAA failed to mention is that they chose Lleida as a base. A city in the Pyrenees where the most famous tourist attraction in the city, is fog. Literally permanent fog for the whole of winter, so it was a great idea to have a winter base for VFR and IFR where no one can actually fly. That will keep costs down. Although they left it until the last possible second to tell everyone where the winter base would be, keeping it a secret like it was early Christmas present to everybody. This meant that everyone had very little time to organise themselves down in Spain. I believe the situation for short-term renting in Spain is nothing short of a joke, with the school offering ZERO support. However they will tell you that living costs and standards are comparable to Lithuania. I can assure all, as a Spaniard, living costs are not on the same scale as Vilnius. But did BAA look into these things, well they will tell you they did. Rumours are they are closing Spain base and moving operations back to Lithuania in the Spring. Good going BAA.
- Aircraft – “We have invested in new VFR and IFR aircraft”. Yes, the old age BAA famous sentence is still going strong, along with 'we don't know', I think this was one of the things I heard management say the most and this was drilled into us weekly. People are still yet to see this investment. 1 LEASED washing machine with wings from Cyprus, does not count as serious investment into aircraft. Other aircraft are dangers, with seriously corroding structures, broken instruments and unreliable systems. It is a well known that there were a few moderately serious accidents in the last couple of years, but BAA will tell you that these were unforeseen and Force Majeure. Force Majeure excuses can only go on for so long, the school has had in some instances over a year and a half to put there aircraft problems right. Now for an even better tale, when the current aircraft (what's left of them) are flying in Spain, do they do the maintenance on base at Lleida...Of course not, this would be to common sensical for BAA, No they ferry the aircraft to and from Sabadell, a 250km round trip.
- Customer Service – BAA treat you as though you are about to buy a 30.000 euro Rolex from them, right up until the moment you give them you’re money and are a student. Then it turns from being the Rolex shop, to a Gulag. There is no customer service, no respect and any ideas you may have to help are simply put down with the thought ‘he’s just a student, we’re managers’ Yes ladies and gentlemen, it is ran as though managers are part of the Politburo. Soviet style aristocracy, which probably explains why BAA are in so much deep water, they’re currently drowning. Once they have, your money, its game over. You’re tied into a contract which is very shady, blames the customer for all problems, charges you 60% of the full course fee if you die….you get the picture.
Now all of these little things pale into insignificance when compared to the BIGGEST problem of all at BAA. A problem which has ultimately caused the mess to students and their wallets in the last 2 years. A problem which led to instructors resigning, poor organisation, poor standards, no customer service, no aircraft, problems in Spain. Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you BAA Senior Management.
In the words of their own employees, ‘they have managers for everything but one thing they don’t have a manager for, is common sense’. Senior Management are young…very young and lack simple management fundamentals. The Chief Operating Officer must only be 5 years older than me at most. I left High School 3 years ago. But with youth and ambition comes a negative aspect. GREED and oh yes, BAA are certainly guilty of it. They are way over capacity at the moment with no signs of slowing down, there wasn’t enough aircraft for people back when I started in 2016. Apparently the student numbers have doubled now, and there are even less aircraft. But let’s keep bringing people through the front door with their money, without reinvesting it in areas that are in desperate need for investment. Rather lets focus our investment on marketing and social media posts.
I have personally seen one person go from Receptionist/Admin Assistant, to a full Project Training Manager in under 6 months, in charge of around 50 students. That’s how desperate they are to get employees in because employees relaise the conditions of work quickly and leave soon after.
Did low level management get a new office that they didn’t need – Yes
Did Senior Management get new facilities, , complete with pool table & bean bags – Yes
Did BAA get more money for their management parties that they seem to have monthly - Yes
Did Students get investment into anything for them such as instructors or new planes or did anyone with a modicum of common sense resolve any of the students problems or worries over the last 12 months – No
Although the price of ATPL Integrated has gone from 62,799 when I started, to I believe a figure around 73,000 euros now. What does someone get for their extra money I hear you ask. Well a student can expect to receive an iPad Mini and err…..uhmmmm. Yeah not very much. A 9000 euro iPad. Nice
So to finish. Prospective students.
DO NOT FALL FOR THE FANCY MARKETING AND THE SMILING FACES I promise you from the bottom of my heart, this will change the second you give them your money. They will entice you with the words ‘a magazine says we are rated 4.8/5 in customer satisfaction by our students’, I beg for BAA to show me those students. They were rated 4.8/5 by a magazine. BAA’s parent company OWNS that magazine, it is like saying ‘who rated you 4.8/5’ and getting the answer ‘well it was us’.
Fancy marketing and YouTube videos of students who are still in ground school flying full motion simulators. I’d love for one of those YouTube students to give me a Q&A about certain procedures on that Airbus simulator, considering that these are people still learning about Lift and Drag formulas then I doubt the Q&A would go on for too long. Just more false advertising, believe me, if you don’t have the face for fancy marketing, then you’ve got no chance of smelling that simulator until your MCC/JOC.
I attended one of BAA’s open days in London earlier this year and was shocked to see how much inaccurate information
they sell to prospective students. Please people, do not fall for it.
I bid for everybody to read the other BAA thread and scroll down to comments made in the last few weeks, I cannot link it as I have less than 10 posts on here under this username, however its quite active so should be close to the top of the list. Honestly, I know people can sit at home and go,
‘unhappy students they will say anything’, honestly, I have read every single comment and cannot find one that I would say is inaccurate. Dukaster, Tecnamflyer, GreenYoda and others make some very good points and even though I don’t know who they are on PPrune, I am sure we will know each other from school, so I can confidently say, none of them are lying.
Hopefully BAA Marketing team read this and maybe give some of us some answers, although they’re probably preparing for another night out. To those senior managers I can only repeat what other people have said – reputation of a flight school is built up over years of hard work and labour and it can come crashing down overnight….
DO NOT THINK YOU ARE BIG ENOUGH TO AVOID THE SAME HAPPENING TO YOU.
As one student said, he has told 7 people to avoid BAA, I myself have told 4 or 5 people. This in itself is nearly 900,000 euros of lost revenue, based on your greed and the way you are treating people. I imagine we are not the only people doing so. You’re reputation is slowly starting to diminish amongst Western Europeans, who are tired of your Soviet methods and mindsets, which is such a shame as the potential for BAA to be one of the best schools in Europe is vast. With the right investment in key areas, I would predict BAA could go far. Already, some of the deadwood middle managers who have been the cause of the majority of the problems in the last year have been removed (Agata & Edita B) and new managers instated, only time will tell if this was a good decision.
Prospective Students, look at other schools. There are a lot of quality schools out there for the same price these days. Do not fall for the, 'we will secure you a job with our partner airlines' or the 'we will have you in the right hand seat in 18 months'. This is a school which still endorses P2F schemes, has lied multiple times to students, creates fake LinkedIn profiles to make them seem bigger and more international than they are, has managers who oversee important aspects of running an academy with little more than high school diplomas and zero experience in an aviation environment, has limited resources, is way overcapacity and more recently 'relationship scandals' between managers and students. Welcome to the house of fun.
Maybe the situation is different for TR courses, which BAA Ab-initio is not affiliated with, so it would be unfair for me to criticise that part of the business as I believe TR at BAA is ran quite effectively and well but Please for ATPL if I haven’t said it already, LOOK ELSEWHERE
Please ask any questions, I have missed a lot of things out as this post would go on all day.