Kick the tires
As one of the old sods who got my ATPL the old way I will take a guess at a total cost of around £30k at 1985 prices.
The great advantage of the old system was that you could hold down a job while doing the training and you had 700 hours of flying behind you when you got to the airliner cockpit.
With my usual sense of timing my CPL/IR was issued on the day Air Europe went bust ! But having a full time job just resulted in me continuing to instruct part time at a flying club until an airline job showed up two years later.
Also I have five airliner type ratings that I never paid a penny for but the airline did require a two year training bond for these type ratings. At the time a lot of plots considered training bonds to be the work of the devil and an illegal restraint of trade, I bet the guys working for flexicrew would bite my hand off for such a deal !
As I was finishing off the CPL the writing was already on the wall for the free type rating with the training bond as a few of the rich kids passing through the system where already offering to buy a type rating in exchange for a job, as you all now know to your considerable cost it did not take very long for the bean counters to get wise to the money that could be made from the rich kids parents.
Last edited by A and C; 10th Mar 2013 at 10:14.