PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Applying to flight schools, got denied
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Old 24th February 2025 | 15:50
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rudestuff
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Joined: Dec 2005
: ATPL
Posts: 4,973
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From: Hong Kong
If flying is your dream, why all the degrees? You could have been flying for 6-7 years by age 24.

As for your question - its not you, it's the system.

Some schools offer training for a licence - they generally care that you have a pulse and a wallet. Think modular.
Other schools get involved with career paths and maybe go into partnerships with airlines so that they can offer promises of employment and jack up the prices. It's just business. Harvard has a huge amount of applicants so they can set higher standards to justify higher prices.

Once they have those glossy brochures printed with words like "Future flyer" and "Mentored" and perhaps some airline logos, they need to keep two clients happy - the pilot and the airline. The airline wants to see a higher standard of 'product' (that's you) that fits their mould and can be trained easily - so in come the aptitude tests to whittle down the stack of CVs, up go the standards and the whole thing becomes a competition.

Now it could be that you're genuinely not very good, but I doubt it. You probably just fell foul of some unknown CV filter and need to cast your net wider.

Does going to a big name school help you get a job quicker? Possibly. But not if you have to work an extra few years to pay for it and miss the hiring wave (you've heard about those?) Getting that first job can be easy if you time it well, or very hard if you don't. Choosing the 'right' school is not the be-all and end-all that many think it is.
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