Originally Posted by
VariablePitchP
What has caused your family to take that view? Something must have, my guess is perhaps fancy marketing brochures with pictures of 19 year olds with 4 gold stripes, a bomber jacket and RayBans? It’s all guff, you get the same bit of paper at the end.
As excellent and respected posters have said (when Alex Whittingham replies, listen) already, integrated schools risk becoming a bit of a pyramid scheme with regards to their financial bedrock. It all collapses and you’re in a far worse position being integrated than modular.
You are in a sausage factory if you go integrated, the last thing you want in the current climate is to have your licence issue date controlled by the school. Go modular and you can control it, you want to be able to time it when the jobs are, as they are now, finally re-emerging.
If it’s just arrogance then, ultimately, at least it’s mostly their money they’re wasting and not yours.
Ultimately your final line has hit the nail on the head - I come from a cliche background of city workers who are very confident their opinion is correct and there is no point arguing: as you say, ultimately it's not my money and without their backing I'd have a lot of saving to do so without wishing to sound too entitled, if things go terribly wrong I'm not losing out much fiscally; and if things go according to plan I have an (expensive) ATPL that for the most part didn't come from my income.
Whilst I'm skeptical of a lot of the integrated schools' liquidity, I think (perhaps optimistically?) that FTE are okay on the grounds they offered a couple of full scholarships recently so they're either sufficiently liquid or just have a psychotic financial advisor; and CAE must be okay on the grounds that MPL programmes are presumably highly profitable given the lack of actual flying hours so any money lost through their ATPL scheme is likely recouped through their margins on the MPL.
Originally Posted by
Contact Approach
If this is the case then CAE is your only option. EasyJets future recruitment of low houred cadets will only come through CAE, this has been confirmed by the company. EasyJet rely heavily on the CAE for sims and you’ll see the EasyJet presence there when you visit. A deal was agreed between both parties that CAE will provide cadets to EasyJet for the foreseeable future. Controversially the EasyJet MPL scheme is probably your best/only chance to get into the RHS and the course provides the structure your family seemingly need. However, be aware of the risks and be prepared to pay extortionate sums of money for the privilege, particularly if it all goes wrong. If money isn’t a priority then that’s the route to go.
Re EASA/U.K. and low houred U.K. jobs: be aware you only have two real options in the U.K. presently and one of those requires an easa licence (Ryanair), they do not accept U.K. licences. The only other option would be Wizz and they require a U.K. licence.
This is what I thought as well, but only last week I saw L3 bragging that a large proportion of their ATPL graduates had successfully completed their first round of ezy assessments - I presume they are the same low hour pilots but they didn't offer too many details. Maybe easyJet are just leading them all on
As for the MPL, the family saw what happened to the MPLs during covid as that made the news, and despite money not being the priority feel it is not a risk worth taking; which to an extent I agree with: I was recently reading that ezy are not recovering as fast as they had expected and the last thing I want is to be shafted without the scope to apply to other airlines - off the top of my head, Wizz and Jet2 both come to mind, and at least having the scope to apply to them with the ATPL feels logical despite it possibly taking a while to get an offer from them. I like to think I'm fairly good at the old interview and aptitude tests (once upon a time I was going to be a doctor and I had offers to some very good universities indeed
) so if there is hiring to be had and I manage to put the networking hat on in the next year or two I hope I might be fairly competitive, in the non-type rated low hour pool that is which I appreciate is not a very competitive position to be in...
tl;dr I shall be in touch with both CAE and FTE to see whether ezy are recruiting their ATPL grads and if so what proportion and will go from there I think.
I don't think I would/could ever go for an MPL just because I would not have the resource to convert it to an ATPL if I were stuffed, but with any luck if CAE (or FTE) ATPLs are being recruited in substantive numbers to ezy or another low-cost UK carrier, it will provide a little comfort. Both of them provide discounted IR renewals if things go long term and I think a BEng gives enough latitude to do something other than driving tesco vans if it is going to take more than a year or two to get an RHS job.
Plus, as someone mentioned up above, 18-24 months of training is a very long time and, hopefully, things may be looking up a little - I think the average Brit will forego a lot of things before their holiday abroad!
Originally Posted by
Arena_33
Ryanair require EASA licence even if living in the UK. Would your family be happy with you flying for RYR?
Have you got your class 1 yet? worth thinking about getting both CAA and EASA class 1 initial if you're looking to obtain both licences
I think my family will be happy with any job at a well known carrier, so I dare say yes - I have at least managed to get them to understand that I am not going to graduate and get a job with BA two weeks later!
Already have the UKCAA class 1, certainly wouldn't have got this far through the process without checking I can actually get one of those - was a bit of a moron and managed to completely miss the fact that the class 1s are no longer valid for EASA so am in the process of burning through my wallet and getting an initial from them as well.