Quick Question.....

[Easy226]

Can anyone just confirm the correctness of this statement....

'lets just clarify this one last time, nice and slowly. First of all, a frozen ATPL is a low hours qualification, which must be finished with a few thousand hours in the right seat, FAR from an IR, in fact again they are seperated by thousands of hours.

At 250 hours you may begin training for your ATPL, that is, flying little planes around and sitting in a simulator for a few hours, got it? then once you have your ATPL after a few THOUSAND hours, then, and only then will you graduate to flying with an airline.'

Many Thanks

[Piltdown Man]

This is a very slow reply. The Frozen ATPL is licence - issued when you have been very good and passed lots of nasty exams. Then, with maybe as many as 250 hours you can go and be part of a crew of an aeroplane. When you have been very good for a further 1,500 hours or so, the nice people in Gatwick will unfreeze your licence. Simple really.

[Easy226]

Ok many thanks for the reply.

[Ropey Pilot]

Easy:

Don't know where you got that quote from but it is considerably more patronising than it is correct.

There is technically no such thing as a frozen ATPL

It is a slang term (in the UK) for a CPL (Commercial pilots licence) with an appropriate Instrument Rating (IR).

The reason the term 'frozen' is used is that there are no further tests or exams required to convert it to an Air Transport Pilots Licence (ATPL) - simply an hours requirement (1500hrs minimum with other provisos such as night hours multi-crew hours etc - On the flip side you may have 25,000 hours and still have a frozen ATPL if you don't meet those requirements, so it is not specifically a low-hours qualification).

The second you have a fATPL you may quite happily sit in the right hand seat (as a First Officer) of any commericial airliner after appropriate special to type training (including an Airbus A380 if the company wishes to employ you to do so). Graduating to an ATPL simply allows you to move to the left seat as a Captain.

In the states there is no fATPL since there are further tests required to obtain an ATPL so you simply have an FAA CPL with IR.