Shaun,
you are obviously articulate, well educated, have some range of interests and are physically fit, so (as I'm sure you are well aware) you are unlikely to fail selection on any technical issue. As you well know, those who wish to be selected for the RAF are encouraged to learn a good deal about the service before they turn up for interview. The same is true of candidates for civilian sponsorships. I imagine you would say that that is exactly what this thread is about, but the tone and breadth of your questions suggests that you have done precious little study in the enormous fund of knowledge that is Pprune.
A fairly cursory search of the Wannabes forums would have revealed that sponsorships are few and far between, and all involve a large degree of financial commitment from the student. There are no fully paid-for sponsorships in existence in UK. There are unlikely to be any in the forseeable future. The nearest that exists is the CTC scheme which defers payment of the 63K cost until you are in paid employment - which is not guaranteed. In fact, this is the first and most important point you need to take on board: unlike the Armed Services, there is no guarantee of employment with anyone
at any stage through any part of training or even after being taken on by an airline. As an airline employee, should you be one of the lucky few to get that far, you are nothing more than an entry on the cost side of the accountants' books. You have a contract that - with the better employers - allows three months notice. It is frequently exercised when the economics aren't in your favour!
The vast majority of those who eventually become paid airline pilots pay their own way through training. Getting an ATPL is an expensive and stressful experience, but it is achieved every day by people with distinctly ordinary financial resources - but an extraordinary degree of determination, enthusiasm and initiative. If you are serious about ever becoming an airline pilot, you must assume that you will have to self-fund your training; any financial help you get via partial sponsorships is a bonus, not a right.
Employment after training is, as I have already intimated, difficult to obtain and extremely precarious. Job security is at the bottom end of the industrial scale. Salaries for most new pilots are equally pretty low. If you are very lucky and end up working for one of the better low-cost or charter airlines (which you will need to do for several years before you could credibly offer yourself to a longhaul airline), you could be on 40k a year or so. Many of your peers will not be so lucky and will have to suffice with a smaller employer and considerably less money. I think any discussion of what you could aspire to in the long term (including pensions and the like) is pretty premature, but a look at
www.ppjn.com might give you some clues. By the way, freight pilots do not earn more than passenger aircraft pilots. Usually, it's considerably less (with a very few honourable exceptions).
You will rarely be given a choice of what aircraft you fly - and certainly not as a new guy, and, until you are fairly senior in your airline, you will have little or no influence over where you fly to. How often pilots fly a given route depends on the airline you work for and how many destinations the aircraft you fly serves.
Shaun, I think you need to immerse yourself in this site (and other civilian airline resources) a good deal more before you ask too many more questions. You need to have a certain amount of background knowledge and understanding before the answers to many of your questions can be seen and understood in context. I could go into great detail about the terms and conditions at Virgin Atlantic (and have done in the appropriate forum), but it would be totally irrelevant to your circumstances. You would need to have a basic understanding of where Virgin stands in the overall airline picture before you could make sense of what I was telling you. It's a bit like going into a detailed explanation of a Formula One car to someone who's just discovered the bicycle!
Have a good look round. Start with the reference sticky thread at the top of the Wannabes Professional Flight Training forum, and read
all of the threads referred to within. Get a feel for the discussions here; you will learn a great deal from them. Go and visit a local flying school and talk to the wannabes in training there. Have a good think about the threads from disillusioned wannbes and decide whether this is really the way you want to go.
I hope you find this has given you some food for thought!
Scroggs