I suppose 88k on your parents house is better than 130k but who's counting?
Some home truths about Lion. They started doing a 500 hours plus 1 year employment. Well if you call 2k USD a month employment. They pay you nothing until you get 500 hours on type.
The course costs 50k USD (when it was running) That's 32k pounds. Now the hotel you stay in for type rating (ratings mostly done in Germany or Netherlands) and all other expenses are paid by you. Flights, meals etc. That will get pretty expensive over 3-4 weeks. Turn up in Jakarta and your ready to go. Well no your not. You wait 4 months for a sim check and pray you pass it or it will be another couple of months before you get another crack at it and if you bomb on this one the money is forfeited. So you pass the check. Fast forward another 4 months and you have finally started line training.
Well wait again cause your IR needs renewing now. Off home you go to do the IR renewal and prof check cause its coming up on 12 months since you did your type rating. Lion don't pay for that so you go to the place you did your type rating to do your renewal. All paid for by you. This is repeated every 6 month. Mmm gets expensive now doesn't it? Who was paying your rent and buying your food for the first 18 months you were in Jakarta until you finally got 500 hours on type. That's right, you.
You can budget on spending about 1000 USD a month on rent, taxi's and food while you wait to get 500 on type. Jakarta is cheap but to say you would spend less than that wouldn't be a true representation. Some will spend much more, other maybe less.
This isn't the exception. A lot of P2F schemes are run like this.
See how getting to around 150k pounds isn't that hard after all?
Last edited by pilotchute; 18th Aug 2013 at 12:44.