Where to begin…the situation in Malaga is complicated,
To answer the first question about LEAX/Granada – 99% of the flying is now done out of Granada with a satellite base in operation. If I had to hazard a guess a large part of training being moved there had to do with UKCAA safety concerns.
Granada is better from a training perspective as students are flying out of a less cowboy area and at a controlled airport, but there are still issues.
For example:
- There is no dedicated maintenance for the aircraft at LEGR.
- There are no simulators at LEGR meaning all sims have to take place at LEAX.
- There is daily commercial traffic. Understandably this is prioritised meaning you can easily spend most of a lesson holding for traffic.
- ATC don’t seem used to school flights so can get jumpy/impose restrictions, especially when as mentioned above, they have to deal with commercial traffic.
- The winter weather (admittedly more of a CAE/delay problem than a LEGR one) has caused numerous cancellations from frequent fog and low cloud or more recently due to icing.
- Transport to LEGR, as cadets started training at LEAX many have long term accommodation around the area, because of this they have to drive over an hour to get to Granada. Due to the delays many who brought their personal vehicles to Spain have had to return them. This means they are reliant on expensive rentals or a bus shuttle service. The shuttle service runs several buses per day but on some days operates just a morning/evening service. Delays occur very frequently as is the nature of flight training, meaning it’s pretty rare to catch the afternoon bus back to LEAX, this results in people being there for the entire day, e.g. 8am arrival at LEGR and 7pm departure from LEGR. Because of these long hours (they can be more than 14 hours door to door), students and instructors have run out of hours leading to cancellations.
As for the current situation in Malaga:
- Of the 4 classes who got sent out, only one (the most senior) is actively training. Instructor numbers have got slightly better over time and the ratios have increased because only one class is training. A tiny handful of this class were rushed through their remaining lessons and have finished core phase very recently. With the remainder of the class making accelerated progress and hopefully finishing soon.
- The second most senior class stayed in Malaga until Christmas, making decent progress in December (compared to previous months) with the vast majority going solo and finishing the VFR flying phase. However, they still have the majority of their flying to do as the IFR phase accounts for about 70% of this, to put a number on it they have been in Malaga since May and done on average around 20 hours total. Since Christmas (when they returned to the UK) communication from CAE has been limited. The current plan seems to be for them to return to Malaga from the end of January in small groups to then begin accelerated training.
- As far as I’m aware the third class was sent back to the UK with the option to continue training in phoenix in early 2025 or wait an undetermined amount of time and return to Malaga when capacity allowed.
- The fourth class was also sent back to the UK. I’m not sure of there current situation but wouldn’t be surprised if they end up in phoenix.
Overall, the situation in Malaga has improved since the first classes were sent out and since the last update post (although not really for the cadets that were sent home permanently), but most of this improvement has come from the removal of classes and consequent balancing of instructor ratios, something that any competent management would’ve done months ago. It will still be months before all the cadets currently assigned to Malaga have finished core phase training, at a time when if things went according to plan most of them should’ve been at ezy or imminently starting.
Still things have taken a step in the right direction and hopefully this continues.
On a more general note, the stuff you read on this forum is just scratching the surface of the total mess that Malaga has been, what is supposed to be the highlight of cadets training has ended up being enormously stressful. The feeling among many cadets is they were rushed out to Malaga way before it was ready and thrown under the bus to save the phoenix operation from even more delays. This is backed up by the fact that all classes finishing ground school have been going to phoenix and significantly junior classes were sent out there months ago and are now at serious risk of overtaking classes that were sent to Malaga.
To further emphasise the scale of the delays, across all the classes sent to Malaga, on average you’re probably going to be looking at it being over a year since finishing ground school by the time you’ve finished core phase. Its also possible that some classes or members of classes will have spent over a year in core phase by the time they finish it and well over 2 years from course start to finish. Throughout the whole Malaga experience, CAE’s incompetence, refusal to acknowledge key issues and their poor communication has made the situation infinitely worse, admittedly there are issues that were out of their control and unfortunate, but many cadets feel the vast majority of the blame lies at the feet of CAE and consequently there is a serious lack of trust and confidence between cadets sent to Malaga and CAE.
I could go on but I think this post is long enough already. So I'll wrap up by saying I think the MPL when it works is a great programme and those in ground school now or sent to America might have a pretty smooth ride and thus feel very differently to the Malaga lot. Admittedly luck and timing play a part, but remember that no one has an entirely smooth ride through training and CAE have shown their true colours with how they’ve treated the Malaga operation and many classes before Malaga.
If I was someone looking at the MPL I wouldn’t write it off completely but would seriously consider applying for all the funded schemes or the standard ATPL route until ezy move the MPL somewhere else or CAE proves they can deliver the course competently.