I did Alex, because the BCPL was a very short term phenomenon that wasn’t really relevant. It was a Basic commercial pilots licence that was upgradable as you have said. The CPL (in the U.K.) had been slashed from a (non-approved) 700 hour requirement to a 250 hour licence as it became the benchmark “aerial work licence.” This brought it into line with most other ICAO member states licences. The BCPL was an irrelevance with regards to airline employment. Even in the pre-JAR days a 700 hour CPL/IR holder was going to struggle to find airline employment. The exception was full time integrated students who had come through the “approved school” programmes that were either wholly owned or affiliated to specific airlines with properly structured cadet programmes. Examples being BEA/BOAC/British airways from Hamble. AST Perth, and Oxford, to companies such as Britannia and others.
The BCPL was a short lived stepping stone to the (non-approved) CPL. It wasn’t a bridge to an (approved) course. I never met a holder of one and clearly it’s longevity was doomed at onset.
Pre-JAA, many of the airlines would recruit from three sources. The military was a popular recruiting ground and satisfied a significant proportion of most recruiting rounds. The approved schools supplied an element of recruits into those airlines with affiliated and structured cadet programmes. The remainder was what then referred to as “ Self improvers.” These were (as now) those pilots who had worked their way through the system obtaining their CPL/IR with a minimum of 700 hours and then gone on to work their way through third and second tier jobs to get the experience levels that airlines usually set as benchmark levels for employment. Generally those levels were
2500-3000 hours of which at least 500 hours were “turbine” or multi engine experience. This latter group comprised a significant source of airline employment and produced a great many excellent pilots. Of the three groups, without doubt, the attrition rates were always highest in the “self improvers.”
JAA, as well as slashing the CPL experience requirements also occurred at about the same time as the appearance of the so called “lo-co operators.” Andy O’Shea’s boss famously suggested that two pilots in the flightdeck was (in his view) one two many. The next best thing was to find the cheapest way of putting a pilot there and taking advantage of a large supply of source material was a good way of achieving that aim. This clearly opened up a pathway that hadn’t really existed before. Of course the laws of supply and demand only work to that goal when the source remains plentiful and this clearly opened up the floodgates that remain to this day. Many other airlines sourced their cadets from the modern incarnations of the previously “approved schools” with the added advantage of gradually shifting almost the entire financial risk burden to those aspirants. The growth in these schools with tied programmes expanded to fill the drop in military sourced candidates as that source shrank,
The MPL was an evolution designed to update the “apprenticeship” training of fully integrated cadet programmes. A good idea in principle. The problem was in practice it’s success relied on the economic success of the participating airlines on an individual basis. As I recall, Stirling Airways in Denmark was a primary adopter and its corporate demise highlighted the problem. A problem that has been reinforced many times since then with changes evolving as a result. As an airline apprenticeship on an ab-initio basis, I believe it was a good concept and the results I have experienced certainly bear that out.
as you say, it will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. I would like to see a two path route into airline flying. The basic requirement being either an ATPL (and 1500 hours) for unstructured candidates and an MPL obtained by a full time course of relevant structured training to airline requirements for apprenticeship “cadet” programmes. In many ways this would bring the requirements back to where they existed pre-JAA and to a certain extent where they already are in North America. Whilst awaiting the howls of protest, I would say that if supply becomes problematic I would expect the consumers (airlines) to either have to reach into their own pocket more than they have had to in recent years, or perhaps Mr O’Shea’s boss will be granted his wish from his own personal Genie.
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n...ercial-flights