Originally Posted by
fransA
Thanks for your vert detailed response.. Really appreciated. Yes the KLM school and Transavia is on his list. And YES, that is his preference, but realistically it is only 5% of the candidates who get hired. We therefore have a PLAN-B in case this is not successful. But his strong preference is the KLM or Transavia. Plan B is the Peru route. He is mixed Duch/Peruvian. In Peru the PPL is only 10K USD. And the CPL (Which is sufficient for the large latin American airlines) is another 35K USD). The most expensive school which says almost everybody gets directly hired by LATAM or similar airlines told us that MAX 50K USD in total. And yes we go for his medical first. He did already an COMPASS test with EPST and his score was 39 out of 42 (cutoff is 26). Most pilot in LATAM go and get their 1500 flying hours and then move to the Middle East. We spoke to three LATAM pilots who now all work as captain in the middle east. The PERU route is only possible for Peruvians.. therefore you not see much of that in this forum. And it is all in Spanish. But as mentioned earlier, the KLM/Transavia route is by far the preferred route.. but the likelihood... we don't know.. Nice that you confirmed that his age is not an issue. Your response was greatly appreciared.
Quite a lot to unpick here. What I’d say is that this forum is fairly weighted towards the UK market, not exclusively but heavily. So a lot of the advice will be from that background, so keep that in mind.
I would say your approach, and I do wonder if it is your approach or your son’s, seems a little scattered.
What is
his end goal? Is it to be a pilot at KLM? More broadly a European pilot? Or a Peruvian pilot? Or an emirates pilot?
Arguably keeping in the EU market is better than the South American market for long term Ts&Cs. Is the training a bit more expensive? Yes absolutely. But the difference would be washed out in a year or two.
Ryanair, EasyJet, Wizz, those would normally be the airlines of choice for an EASA licence holder not getting straight into their native flag carrier. I just don’t understand why you’d then pivot towards LATAM, unless
he especially wants to fly for them, then of course it makes sense.
If he were to get into a sponsored course with KLM then by all means bin uni, the degree serves no purpose from then. KLM’s safety net in terms of pension and loss or licence is his backup. A year of lost seniority at KLM is not worth a masters.
But for everything else, he can start flying training little and often when not doing the masters and it would seem very rushed to drop out of an already started masters just to do a regular licence to apply to Easy/Wizz/RYR down the line.
I would echo other posters sentiment though. It’s pointless you forcing your dream on him. He’s not 15 any more, you’ve got to let him decide what he wants to do. You then decide if you are comfortable financing it