Atlantic Flight Training - Are You Having A Laugh?

[CookPassBabtridge]

Just saw the latest "news" from AFT.

AFT Flight Crew Selection Day at London Heathrow 12 July 2012 | Pilot Career News

So let me get this straight. You pay £149 to attend a selection day for their integrated course which costs an eye-watering £83,000. But wait for it, you can divide that up into 4 payments! That's a relief, at least now I will be able to stagger the remortgaging of all my close relatives' houses.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm sure there's hundreds of hopefuls queuing up to part with their Saturday job earnings/student loans/unemployment benefit to attend. And I can't imagine they'll be saying no to many of the no-hopers at £83k a pop.

Please people, spend your cash on an hour's flying lesson and stay well away.

[NzCaptainAndrew]

I might just go win the lottery

[pudoc]

How long until CTC catch on. Soon enough there'll be a CTC-EZY scheme called "flexipoo" where if you are an off-duty pilot travelling with easyJet, you must pay tax.

[Hansard]

Calling it "Flight Crew Selection" is a complete con.

[gordonquinn]

I've seen a few cadet schemes like this, I was thinking to myself, they must make a nice little earner out of these "flight crew selection" days.

I registered interest in one, hoping they would feel sorry for me and give me the training for free, or pay in 83,000 monthly installments next thing I'm gettin 3 phone calls a day from Spain and a woman trying to convince me to pay £149 for one of these assessments, even though I point blank said I have no security or way to afford this.

I'm thinking there's some questionable tactics here, I won't say preying, but acting like a vulture might, on people who are desperate to get their dream.

[magicmick]

Atlantic seem to be trying to trying to step out of the shadow of their modular past and looking towards a new ‘integrated dawn.’

This, and their pricing policy will put them ‘toe to toe’ with the likes of CTC, OAA, FTE etc. PTC in Ireland recently attempted a similar exercise and there’s a couple of threads on here that discuss how well that went.

PTC aren’t the first and they will not be the last, splitting the course into 4 staged payments still involves 4 very large sums of money which will have to be paid and cleared before the student passes onto the next stage of training. I’m not sure at what stage in the course these payments have to be made but when you consider that the most expensive training (CPL, MEP and MEIR) occur at the end of the course, if you are paying at 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% of the course completion date you are paying up an awful lot of money before actually receiving the training. While this is not pay everything up front it ain’t pay as you go and still exposes the students to massive financial risk.

If you want to train integrated, that’s fine just be extremely cautious of this place.

[pudoc]

I'm thinking there's some questionable tactics here

Corruption. That's all it is. Nobody can do anything because they'll have a good reason for these 'fees', but bottom line is that a lot of flying schools, including the biggest, are corrupt.