The MPL is £8500 more expensive at Oxford than their ATPL course.
It is £15000 cheaper at CTC but you pay for this in experience (less hours especially PIC) and flexibility. Get sacked for whatever reason? God forbid there's an aircraft accident or Brexit has even worse economic ramifications and easyJet have to release you while you're in training? (It has happened with other airlines!) Good luck going through the paperwork nightmare of getting hired at another airline with an MPL.
The long and short of it is there is no golden route anymore, except if you're an Emirati national or something and get everything subsided for the government, or you get onto the Aer Lingus cadetship where they fund a lot of it (and bloody good on them!)
Each route has it's pros and cons.
MPL? Easier ride through training. No CPL/IR/MCC rides to fail. The stage checks are a breeze.
But you're buggered if you get the boot for whatever reason.
(f)ATPL. Harder training, more opportunity to fail. People can and do wash out. I've seen it happen first hand, it's extremely sad. But you come out with real licenses that can take you anywhere and give you options.
I cannot recommend one over the other because both have pros and cons. It is up to the prospective trainee I'm afraid to make their own decision after weighing up all the options. People ask me if they should go to CTC and I can only say I can't say yes or no. People are getting jobs very quickly, but again god forbid something happens then the situation can change in the blink of an eye. I don't want to be responsible for dampening people's dreams by putting them off it, or encouraging them to sign up and then they wash out of training or something and lose money, so all I will tell you is read the terms and conditions extremely carefully and be totally, totally honest with yourself whether you truly want to be an Airline Pilot and you can financially, mentally and socially accept the risks of failure.
It is perhaps unfair of me to say "no don't apply" when I got an airline interview arranged hours after finishing AQC. I worked my bollocks off and I feel I have the right to be proud of some of my achievements at CTC. But on the other hand I am a very lucky man that the hiring situation in Europe lately has been fantastic and I graduated at the right time. Will it be the same in 18 months/two years? Very possibly not.
I have quickly learnt that this industry is mostly about luck and timing. I wish the same for you guys and genuinely give you my best wishes in your pursuits of your dreams. But I must be honest with you that you need to sit down and have a really good think and weigh up the options, it must be you (and possibly with the input of your parents) that makes the decision and that you don't let the glamorous brochures and success stories cloud your consideration and appreciation of the magnitude of the frankly scary legal contracts you will sign with CTC and BBVA.
And it is bloody scary. I look back at the days of my CPL/IR skills tests, my AQC assessment sims, and my airline assessment process, and shudder at the thought of how differently things could have gone. How lucky I got with a ground feature rich nav section on CPL! As good as the hiring situation is, a 2 hour CPL or IR checkride can be the difference between getting hired or not, if you full on fail. Do you have the confidence in yourself to risk £100,000 on a 2 hour IR checkride? I'm not saying it's an automatic no-go or anything, people have been hired with series 2 CPL's, but again that depends completely on time and place. Would they have been snapped up so quickly with that result 2 or 3 years ago? I don't think so.
Last edited by tech log; 15th Jan 2017 at 19:11.