Need some help.

[Genghis the Engineer]

What to do next?

At risk of stating the very obvious - learn to fly.

For most people, becoming a professional pilot requires the following qualifications, typically completed in this order:-

PPL
Night
CPL
SEP/IR (some people skip this and go straight to MEP/IR)
MEP/IR
MCC (only essential if going airlines)

The first on the ladder, the Private Pilots Licence is one of the cheapest, but it still requires a lot of application and effort. The whole lot takes the equivalent of about 18 months full time effort so if you're working and doing this part time - as many of us did, you'll take rather longer. That's fine, you're annoyingly young, and we live in a society where nobody can expect to retire before 70 any more, and many people change career one or more times in the course of their life.

So, start with a couple of lessons to get a basic feel of being in the air, then commit yourself to a PPL on light aircraft. If you go pro, it's a necessary step on the ladder, if you don't, you'll have either found an amazing hobby, or just had a cheap lesson about yourself and your abilities.

The PPL will tell you if you have the motivation, aptitude and capacity to become a pilot. Nothing else will do that as well or as cheaply: you'll be spending £7-£10k, which isn't cheap in absolute terms, but far cheaper than the full course.

If you have a weak school education, you'll probably also need to pick up your maths and science: especially physics. There are plenty of ways to do that, and they're affordable, just take effort on your part. The standards are not that high: somewhere between GCSE and A level, and anybody who wants it enough can get there.


The PPL is it. It'll answer the questions about yourself, and it'll also put you in a much more informed position to make the big decisions about the rest of the training, and whether it's for you. No amount of advice from us, or your chum at Ryanair, will tell substitute for having that personal experience - although absolutely take all the advice you can get - but as well, not instead.

It's worth, en-route, learning that there are a whole bunch of different ways of earning your living in the air, and being an airline pilot isn't the only one. It's also not necessarily the easiest to get into, nor at the bottom end all that well paid (at the top, it certainly is) - but the PPL is a perfectly good route into just about any other form of professional flying, not just the obvious one.