Robbed - thank you for sharing your experience with us all. Most illuminating and a tale that I have heard many times for many years. My advice has remained that it is better to save £20k, go modular at a good school and then be in either less debt or buy a type rating or get GECAT or CTC to help you over the wall into the airlines. Or approach a smaller air taxi operator and offer to self fund a rating.
Integrated does work for some and they would be the first to promote the benefits. I think though that it doesn't work for the majority and your figures suggest just that.
I also think the selection procedures for recommendation are weak. A perfectly good pilot can fluff his IRT or partial his CPL or just scrape their weakest exam subject. A total prat can ace the lot. And to be honest it makes not a jot worth of difference when you get to line training. A student I know of who was the ace of his course got chopped on line training. Similarly a student who actually ripped of a nosewheel, twice, whose navigation was more luck than judgement and who was sick if you went past a 30 degree bank angle has just completed their command course last month I hear.
Its more the person and their character and their motivation that is important. Unfortunately I think very large schools are uniquely bad at getting to know their students. Its a huge sausage machine and one course looks very similar to another on the conveyor belt.
I flew with someone the other day who had done the whole Modular course for £42k from scratch by various means including buying into a syndicate aircraft. All in the UK, all at Little Piddlington in the Marsh School of Flying, and he is about £40k up on some others I have seen.
Thats a good house deposit.
Good luck,
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