Charlie....
It is very hard to hear this, but you have been sucked in with brochures, hype and smooth sales talking from a person sitting in front of you who realises that you have a dream, and all he needs to do is tell you that it is achievable to get you to hand over 40 grand.
So before you spend any more money on integrated study and skills courses, take some advice from someone on the front-line so to speak.
To begin, let me tell you something, (and I am sure that most of the "now-out-of-training-and-have-been-flying-for-at-least-three-years" contributors will back me up on this.....
At some point in your dream of becoming a pilot, reality bites and you wake up to find that a job flying is definitely up there with the best of work on the planet....but it is not even close to what you are fantasising about.
I talk to wannabes on a regular basis here, and they all answer the "Why do you want to become a pilot?" question in the same way...."Great job!" "Always wanted to be a pilot" "Lots of respect and prestige" "Get to travel all over the world".
If I could record all these kids on video and replay it for them after a few years, the responses for most would be sheepish to say the least.
If you find employment at the end of your training, you will have a job that gives you all of the above but there is a trade off which perhaps as a youngster, you have no cares about, but when you find the love of your life and maybe want to start a family, you will see where I am going with this.....
You will have no real social life. Your main drinking buddies will be crews that are down-route with you. The world travel involves traffic jams, hotels, blackout blinds and buffet breakfasts. It gets old really quickly, and if you get a job with a lo-co in the UK or Europe, the only world travel you will experience is meeting fuel bowser drivers and flashing number cards out your side window at them.
You will be expected to get up at any and all hours to get the job done. Your days-off will be spent checking for missed calls from crewing and worrying that they are going to screw you over for your planned vacation because you didn't help them out today....
Respect is something that you get from other "dreamers" who want to do what you do.
Crewing don't give a damn about you. Cabin crew certainly couldn't give a proverbial piece about you. And management, couldn't give a toss about your loan or the time you have invested in your training and they certainly won't give a rat's arse about your degree. A stroke of a pen can bring you from swanning through Gatwick with your new Jeppesen flight bag to packing shelves at Tesco and again, checking your phone for missed calls from HSBC looking for their instalment - or worse...your parent's instalment!
Then there is the risk of “putting all your eggs in one basket”. Like the poor souls who invested someone else’s equity in a flight school that left them all begging the government for flights home and an idiot's bailout.
The majority of that group were told on this forum and others that paying up-front for a flight school could be fiscal suicide. I wonder how many of them passed that nugget of information on to their parents to allow informed decisions to be made.
That story should be masoned into a monument for the financially naive!
What are they doing now? Anyone?
My guess is that some are working at the local Burger King to make ends meet, but you can be sure that some have moved on to a new dream of another bank loan and a new school. It is madness.
My advice: forget about flying for now. Go and get a degree first. Your back-up plan should be in place before your dream. Proof of that is the PTC circus mentioned above.
Do not get an aviation related degree. That is only half a back-up plan. Do something completely different. That way, when the industry goes into another decline, and believe me, it will....you have another string to your bow, be it law or civil engineering.....or train as a debt management specialist....now there’s a qualification that would make you a fortune in a downturn.
Sorry to
on your parade, but I have seen this industry from many sides now and it ain’t what it looks like on the box....or in the brochure.