Folks,
The time has come to make that all important life, changing career move at the ripe old age of 35 and if I may I would like to trouble you for some advice!
Background:- I'm a lifelong propellor-head who's been desparate to find a way to break into the field of aviation but have to date been sadly thwarted. Despite this I've grabbed my opportunities wherever and whenever I could, flying Chipmunks and motor gliders with the ATC, short hops in gliders and light aircraft with friends, jumpseat flights back when they were more comon and even taking two actual flying lessons in Cincinatti whilst on a work placement.
I am now in the very fortunate position of having a wonderful wife who apart from her many other qualities earns twice my salary and we have a decent amount of equity tied up in the house, though not enough to cover an integrated course. I'm currently working for RR in Derby as a Chartered Engineer designing Turbine hardware for large civil Turbofans. With the gentle encouragement of my wife ringing in my ears ("Just go and learn to be a pilot for Gawd's sake!") I am now making the first moves that will eventually see me leave a comfortable job in search of a new career in commercial aviation.
I've done a fair amount of lurking and reading in the PPruNe forum pages trying to fathom out the ins, the outs, who's good, who's bad, what's required, what's it going to cost and so on.
Like I say, I think the Integrated route is not really an option for me with a course cost range of between £60k and £80k. Therefore I'm looking at JAA Ab Initio ATPL courses as being the potential route to my dreams.
One example I've seen has a course cost of around £30k. On top of that are the following costs, some of which I've found but some of which I could do with some help on:
Class 1 Medical - £411 to be taken at the Gatwick AMC. Critical... If I fail this I'm stumped!
The only thing I might have a problem with is Eyesight. I've printed off the JAA Class 12 visual standards and will be gong to see my optician ASAP to ensure I meet the requirements.
CAA Test & Examination Fees - From what I've gathered thus far there are 14 exams and the fees from April '04 will be £55 per exam. This is an expensive business so I'm pretty certain the CAA test is a separate and costly item but have not found this info so far.
Aircraft Hire for Tests - Wow! How long is a piece of string?!? Any views on this?
Licence issue fees -
170A Test Fee -
Landing & approach fees while in the UK -
I guess what I'm looking for is the
REAL end figure that I'm likely to have paid at the end of the day. £30k +....£10k? £15k? £20k?
The next question I guess is, having passed and been awarded a Frozen ATPL my next move is to go out looking for an employer who will hire me and train me for type rating on their aircraft. Is this where the bonded pilot comes into it? I would assume that if they're going to spend a large sum of money training me to fly a 737 / A320 / whatever, they're going to want me to stick around and repay my tuition. What sort of pay rates do bonded pilots get? In fact, what sort of pay does a non bonded FO get? I'm not in this for the money, but this would be useful to know up front.
You can probably guess which Flight training centre I've used as the basis for my sums... can you recommend any others withing reasonable striking distance of Derby?
I've got a million and one other questions but these'll do for now!
Thank you all for your time and your patience with yet another wannabe!
Cheers!
WLRR