Mercenary Pilot
Firstly let me tell you I am not an instructor at Bonus Aviation, in fact I do not hold or ever have held an instructors rating, I am in fact as my PPRuNe name suggests a B737 pilot with a large UK based airline with a just a few thousand hours on Jets!
How do I know about Bonus – well for 2 reasons I fly with a couple of colleagues who were trained by Bonus and both of them speak highly of the company’s training record and secondly I was invited by a colleague to look at the Jet Simulator that is in the Bonus Engineering hangar. I spoke to some of the instructors and actually saw one of them fly the Jet Sim. I have to say I was impressed by both this Instructors skills on the Jet and the pretty impressive simulator itself. I also have another colleague who is a senior TRE with my airline who has had more than a little contact with Bonus in the past who just evaluated the same Jet Sim and he was very impressed with the simulator too. However, he mentioned too that the quality of instruction at Bonus was very good in his opinion, so I am interested in your very broad brushed statement that your airline and others bin the applications from people trained by Bonus! I will in the meantime speak to our recruitment department next week and check if our airline has any policy of this nature in place with either Bonus or any other training provider.
What I can tell you is that there is certainly more than enough evidence that the IR’s gained in Spain seem to be a waste of time and money. This is much more that just rumoursamongst my airline colleague I have heard this from friends in the corporate jet and air taxi world too. I would very much welcome comment by any other airline assessor pilots if they have any similar feedback on people with Spanish IR’s. What I do find particularly painful is that I did my initial IR with the CAA and that I made the standard, but the CAA issue IR’s done in Spain on a UK license which lead people to believe that the holders of these IR’s have been trained and tested by our CAA implying that these people have met the same standards I did!
MP your other comment that the CAA removed someone’s IR during a type rating test is certainly something very new to me – I just don’t know of or have ever heard of such a thing having happened. I doubt if the CAA has even the authority to remove an IR completely from a license. If this did happen I am certain that words were had with the CAA Staff Examiner who did the initial IRT by the Chief Flight Examiner! Are you sure that the person involved had not got a Spanish IR issued on the CAA CPL?
The issues you raise are of some concern to me so I will speak to my various contacts within the airlines and the CAA to see whether any of these statements of yours bear any substance.
MP it seems like you have an axe to grind against Bonus Aviation – perhaps you might like to PM me and we could speak off the record about your comments?
Looking forward to hearing from you or not as the case may be?
Regards, Dr Boeing