Originally Posted by
Icarus2001
Capacity of 250 cadets per year. Original plan talked up eventual capacity of 500 per year.
So, someone check my numbers here. Say 200 cadets doing 150 CPL course initially. That is 30,000 hours. Over one third of which are solo hours but for those an instructor is "supervising" on the ground or contactable by electronic means. They are going to need a lot of instructors.
Pretty late to thread, made an account just for it. As someone that studied at QGPA, I can confirm there is no chance they can hold that many students. Currently, the most courses they run at any given time is 8 or 9, with these course ranging from as low as 7 students to the largest being around 20. Even if all course had 20, thats still only 180. Theres a few reasons why they cant have much more than that, and definitely not near the 500 capacity that was originally planned:
- Theres only 5 class rooms, and only 2 of those can hold classes of more then 15-20ish people.
- They dont have the aircraft... There were multiple days where flights would be cancelled just due to the lack of aircraft, and theres not much room to put any new aircraft. I believe we only have 5 or 6 ME aircraft as well, so having more people would basically hault MEA and MECIR
- Weather: Toowoomba definitely does not get 300 days of good weather a year. Winters are wet and rainy, and summers are full of storms. Every course has numerous that fall behind due to it and aircraft availability, with the most recent course only having 15% of the cohort making CPL on time.
- Instructors: They're extremely short staffed in QFI's, with more/most leaving in the near future.
- Accomodation: Although they say you don't need to live on campus, It's pretty much drilled into you that you should. The closest houses are 20-30 minutes drive. And the current campus only hold 144 people, with more houses being built bringing it to 228. Currently like 90% of students live on campus.
As for other posts regarding Qantas and the jobs and stuff, yeah, its pretty vague. Nothing's gauranteed. All the QGPA does is get you direct entry into the Qantas Future Pilot Program unlike people at other universities which have to apply. QFPP consists of 5 modules, with team meetings at each one, followed by quizes/assessments for each one. You get a mentor too, but thats about it. Once you finish all the modules, if you have over 80%, you can continue on to a meeting with QFPP, once you pass that you do a medical and some simulator assessments. Once you pass that you go onto the hold file for Qlink. But all of that can also be achieved at any one of the approved QFPP universities, you just need to apply, its the only difference. Apparently there are talks of creating another Flight instructor pathway, which would consist of students getting their FIR after they graduate, then Instructing at FTA for a minimum amount of time (Unknown how long yet), before being moved to Jetstar on the 787 as an SO, but thats still just rumors.
I only picked QGPA because it was quicker then other courses and I could still put it on HECS. Uni courses are all 2 years for an Associates Degree, while this is only 13 months, and you skip all the random university subjects that get added on. Overall though I really wouldn't say its world class training or anything like they like to say. There's alot of management issues and random trash that goes on. There would definitely be better programs out there.