What the hell are we supposed to do?

[George Foreman]

Well having read through this lengthy topic I only have a couple of comments to add... As a self (and I do mean self) funded Integrated student I met one or two "Lucifers" during my training, and they soured the atmosphere a little for me. As a type they are highly gullible and naive.

Throughout my professional life I have sought the best training from one of the big name, highly-regarded institutions and I applied the same pholosophy to aviation. However, when you are paying yourself the question of value for money arises. One might also regret paying up front for a service not yet delivered, and in this way I was also probably a bit naive initially, if I am honest. However, I always kept an open and enquiring mind.

Thankfully "Lucifers" are rare, but these people do their compatriots no favours in the real world of aviation, which is a fantastically diverse place full of people from all walks of life with all kinds of flying backgrounds and aviation/life experience.

Thankfully this kind of attitude is a minority view, but it is non the less ill informed and all totally unsubstantiated, as WWW and Scroggs have attested. Not that any of this matters 6 months down the line as WWW says, but in my subsequent airline training I find that most of the colleagues I meet in the crew room or the sim centre have a modular training background these days.

Any credible commentator will be someone who takes a blanced view of this debate; there are all sorts of factors involved in making the decision on how and where to conduct your training. I enjoyed my basic training and have some good friends from those days, but there are also some excellent modular schools out there and with hindsight, if I had to do it all again, on the same budget I'd set myself a disciplined timetable for it all and go modular, saving the integrated "cost premium" for a FI rating &/or a self-sponsored type rating if necessary (as it increasingly is).

There are as many flight training ideologies out there as there are preachers, (or marketeers). However, with hindsight, my view now is that for the same money it has to be a better bet to have the same licence and a FI or to be type qualified (albeit following a selection process, and on some sort of cadet scheme) than simply integrated and at the whim of both the market and your school.

Again, just my thoughts.

Happy landings to all,
George