Do a PPL first !
Here, and other places, one reads the hopes and dreams of people (mostly young men) desperate to become professional pilots. And quite commonly they have decided to launch head first into a very expensive course of professional flying training, despite no prior flying experience.
I'm just going to have a rant now, because increasingly I think somebody needs to.
DO A PPL FIRST BOYS !!!!!!
Why?
- To find out if you actually enjoy flying
- To find out if you have any aptitude for flying
- To discover if you have the motivation to keep going through flying training
- To de-risk the whole thing before you commit huge amounts of money and time to this endeavour.
I don't honestly think it matters all that much what sort of PPL you do - an ICAO (insert country of your choice / residence) is the most obvious, but microlights, gliders, motorgliders will all tick all of these boxes, even if it may add a few thousand to your eventual bill to CPL/ATPL. If you are going for military pilot of-course, they want to see some experience and a lot of motivation, and really won't care what you got that flying in.
But I can see absolutely no good reason for anybody to dive into an incredibly expensive and time consuming course of training without getting some basic experience of flying first - which basically means to PPL (or equivalent in, say, gliders) level first.
Does anybody disagree? If so, why?
G