Mike,
It's been written elsewhere many times over, but maybe you haven't seen it, so here goes. When you come away from a helicopter school with your new CPL/H, you're 99.99% unemployable. This is because no operators want to employ someone without operational experience and their insurers won't let them touch you with a barge-pole.
There might be a tiny handful of opportunities for those who excel on their courses to be kept on as instructors, if they can afford to pay for an instructors qualification, but I wouldn't risk something around £80k, depending on where and what one trains on, to get a bare CPL/H and then to find that I'm regarded only as useful for sweeping the hangar floor.
This is the big benefit of training at Bristow Academy; you are a known quantity to them and stand a better chance than those who aren't academy graduates of being considered for a North Sea job as a copilot. After about 5,6 or 7 years, you become eligible for a captaincy.
Whichever route you choose to follow, you'll sooner or later need to spend a few more tens of thousands on an instrument rating to get one of the better jobs, or spend it on building your hours to become worth considering. Those "romantic" glacier and mountain and volcano tourism jobs don't pay very well and you might have to live something of a gypsy existence. I believe that working off billionaires' boats isn't all that appealing either.
North Sea copilots currently start on around £50k and senior captains are well over £100k, sleeping in their own beds almost every night. I know which route I'd choose.
Last edited by Colibri49; 5th October 2013 at 06:22.