Originally Posted by
Uplinker
I think some airlines like to see that their candidates have attended a full-time integrated ATPL course at a flying school.
This is, (or was) * because students will definitely be properly trained in classrooms by professional teachers. And their flying training will be organised and scheduled, again with professional instructors. The integrated and full time structure brings with it a schedule, an organisation, a consistency, and of course the school needs to maintain a good reputation for the quality of its students.
The scheduled structure tells the airlines that a successful cadet can absorb and assimilate all the ATPL information within a certain timeframe. With modular, a student might be just as good, or might take years to complete the course. Airlines need to know that a cadet has the ability to learn and pass a new type rating, for example, within a few weeks, and pass their 6 monthly recurrent SIM exams every time.
With the modular route there is no guarantee that students will have learned the information in a classroom; in-depth and within a tight timeframe, or have just practised and practised with question banks.
There was a pilot on the Tech Log not long ago, who clearly had no idea whatsoever about the electrical generation systems in their (passenger airliner) aircraft. How could this have been if they had really studied the subject ?
Obviously, there will be plenty of modular pilots who have a full depth of knowledge, but how can airlines know ? Sadly, they won't necessarily spend the time finding out - they might take only the integrated cadets from known schools, to save them a lot of selection work. We had several airline recruiters visit our school to invite applications.
* Just my experience, you understand, based on my own training on a full-time integrated ATPL course at a well known flying school 25 years ago. I am not personally saying that modular is necessarily inferior.
(And I did my integrated full time training in the years before the school prices went really stupid).
.
from talking with trainers it is because integrated training is predictable and auditable especially as they have pre-selection assessments to pass. Modular students present more of a training risk to airlines- line training is incredibly expensive and every sector in addition to the standard 50 (or whatever other airlines do) sector footprint is a huge cost to airlines
personally I’ve done a lot of safety pilot jumpseating for cadets under line training in the last 12 months and have seen a number of modular students, I’m not sure I see a correlation between modular and being of a lower quality but I will say the most at sea cadet I came across was a significantly older (over 40) man who had done a modular course, he seemed dramatically behind the curve and anecdotally I’ve heard from trainers we are failing a lot more people in line training and or doing dramatically more than the standard line training footprint since Covid, take that for what it’s worth.