OAT vs FTE
 

Hi everyone,

Been looking into various training schools and have noticed that the main names that always pop up are Oxford, FTE and sometime CTC or Cabair. Also had a look on another forum where someone had written that OAT appears to be more expensive due to its good reputation, however, FTE is cheaper and has an equally good reputation, is this true?

What are your thoughts on it, and would be good to get any feedback from students past and present. Additionally, if anyone knows the breakdown of graduates who end up in top airlines that would be a good marker as well.

I leave it open to debate...

Cheers!

With current exchange rates I think FTE works out at about 72k.. and the baisc course price for OAA (just been re-named).. is 63k.. So the rest is however much you will need to live.

It all depends on your wants and needs. I am considering both but Oxford is my main option.

My 2ps worth.
PM me if you want my msn addy to have a chat!

New website for OAA.

http://www.oaa.com/index.asp

Also check out the Oxford forums http://ask.oxfordaviation.net/index.php

SpamFritters left out £4500 at OAA for CAA Exam Fees, so £67,500 plus accommodation and meals pushes it upwards of £75K. So it's a little more than FTE, as you said.

Both are great schools, so why not visit them and make your decision after seeing them in person.

I'm currently at Oxford, just about to finish the groundschool and for my 2p's worth I'm certain I made the right choice, after having fully investigated FTE, cabair etc. Those are both great schools, but Oxford just had the edge for me, in terms of both training and job prospects. I have a budget of £75k and will (hopefully!) meet that comfortably, to give you an idea.

Hope that helps!

DJFC,

I've seen the budget handout from an OAA seminar and their figures are nowhere near £85K. Was it a student or a staffer who told you £85K? I know their accommodation is pricey, but allowing a generous £4K for meals would total £71,500 leaving £13,500 for accommodation to get to your figure. Even OAA rooms are not that expensive, though £5-7K is still pricey!

Sorry if its my question is a bit inapproate for this thread, but how are most of you funding the costs of your training?

80k is what the oxford guys say to live comfortably.
After the 67k for the OAA base fees it is what you make it.

No point in under budgeting though.. or you will be in stick trouble.

And to the last poster.. yes quite a few people fund their own training.
Although could you try for one of the tagged schemes.

Also budget for a full IR retake and a couple of extra hours in the Seneca. Just to be on the extra safe side incase the worse happens. I would suggest you do that for any budget plan for every school :ok:

Yup.
And it is a bonus if you pass first time

No. It's beer money if you pass the first time! :)

And plenty of it - compared to the price of a CAA IR partial or resit that is!

Ex Oxford grad, went through all the same questions as you are rightly asking. FTE is a good school, Cabair also.

Is Oxford training better than those 2, not necessarily, but it's reputation is and when you leave with the same licence from all 3 schools, I promise you that having trained in Oxford will open many doors.

All of my course have good jobs.

When you finish, you will all have a licence but employers will look at where you got it and an Oxford education will get you interviews.

good luck to you, It is bloody hard work and I wouldn't want to do it all again, but it will be worth it in the long run and if you work hard and get good grades at Oxford I would put my 85K a year salary on you getting a job.

Basic Budget
 

Course Costs

Full integrated course

£63,000

CAA Test Fees/Charges

£4,500

Total

£67,500

Living Costs (optional)

Accommodation (UK) – Room Only (based on 43 weeks)

£ 4,945*

Meals Allowance
(allows £10.00 per day)

£ 4,410

Total

£9,355

Total Expenditure

£76,855

*Based on 43 weeks in Upper Heyford or Langford Hall West Wing at £115 per week room only. Langford Hall East Wing rate is £165 per week.

Obviously this doesn't take into account any extra hours/retakes/gambling sprees in Las Vegas etc

Hope it helps

wish2fly

Well the accomodation charge is a rip off. Only 2 on my course, all those years ago stayed in the accom. stay for the first couple of weeks then rent a house with course colleagues and save a packet.

Don't forget the interest if you are taking a loan. WISH2FLY figures: (Oat accomodation, 1st pass in IR): 76,855. Assume 8.5% for two years: 90,475 for your little blue book. If you are lucky/good you don't have to pay for your type, starting salary at Flybe: 23k...

Saccade,

Interest is currently 7.5%. About £3,000 accrues during the course and another £2,000 if you take the six month repayment holiday.

£76,855 + £5,000 = £81,855 not the £90,475 you state. If you meant the £90,475 as the total, then you are way under. If you take 11 years to repay, it will come to about £30K total interest.

The interest is not part of the price of the ATPL, it is the cost of the money that let's you do the ATPL now so you don't have to wait another 10 years while you save it up.

How much more could you earn working as a pilot for those 10 years instead of what you do now? You could be earning £100K with Ryanair as a Captain in 5-6 years.

I am not advocating taking foolish risks, but there are people who could make the £600 per month payment on what they earn today quite handily and they are doing the maths and deciding the risk is worth taking for the opportunity of an extra 10 years earning pilot wages.

Many are doing the maths and deciding Modular is a great way to get there for even less. It's horses for courses, but without the risk, there is no reward.

3 of my brainwashed friends did OAT and are still looking , 3 years after, they are still looking and in 3 years, they will be still looking with their 200h flight time.
Talked to a recruiter last year, he told me he got CV from arrogant Oxford applicants, their CV found their place ...in a trash can!

you won't get more chance because you have been trained in an integrated school, the entrance tests and psy tests are the same for all.

with the money you pay, you can buy 2 houses.
Don't forget to pay for MCC, type rating, and building time, if you want compete with modular students!!!.

Dartagnan,

Everyone who does an fATPL needs to have a plan for staying current and renewing their ratings if the job search goes long. Did your friends plan for this? Have they been flying 50 hours a year or so and renewing their ratings?

If not, they should not blame OAA for their difficulty or for their own poor contingency planning. I think one needs to budget about at least £5K per year for currency/renewals and that is if you get a share in a plane to keep the hourly rate down.

I don't think people should go in with blinders on, but those with a good backup plan will usually make it. This does not mean 100% will. PPRuNe is littered with those who didn't. Unfortunately, the unemployed have more time for posting here, so in my opinion, the doom and gloom viewpoint is over-represented. Most wannabes are smart enough to figure that out though and glean the good advice offered here.

Yes, that is the most positive scenario. But you could also be chopped halfway through the FR type, the risk is all yours. Or laid off as brookfielder because MOL had to sell some planes to get the load factors up. In general, I believe the training costs/earning potential is getting very critical. A great majority will be living on a minimum wage (after repayments) for many years. Open Skies makes it again very clear what the trend is. But as you said, the situation is different for everyone.

hey all,

Differences between the 2 FTE and OAA? I have looked into both of them and still couldn't decide which 1 to go for!

For those who grad from OAA, which courese did u go for? the APP?

May someone tell me, what are the chances to land a jet job after graduating from an intergrated school?

Dartagnan, you're right on one point : no matter which FTO trained you, you'll have to pass selections to get a job.

And if OAT or FTE might better prepare their students to these selections than any FTO, it's still not enough. No job's guarantee

Assymetricdrift, it'd be very interesting for all of us if you could describe how you were prepared to your interviews and how many did you get?
Did OAT recommended you to any airline?

Dartagnan

I gave no allegiance to any school, but your criticism of OAT seems to be rather biased. You insinuate that few OAT graduates get work, then how do you explain a) OAT's very good job statisitcs (at least OAT have the guts to publish their figures for all to see) and b) why do so many people want to go to OAT and why does OAT continue to turn down numerous applicants that are found not to be good enough at the selection stage.

You may knock any flight training school, but OAT and other schools seem to provide a product that the airlines want.:=

SkintmaN

OAA offer a money back policy if you fail to reach the required standard, right up to the CPL Skills test, and there is a degree at the end of it all as well.
Students getting places with carriers within weeks of leaving.
OK some are taking much longer, and are holding out for for their dream, but many students are more realistic.
As for training standards, well all UK or JAA schools have to maintain standards to hold their approvals.
But what has not been mentioned is that the OAA course includes an MCC and JOC whereas FTE only offer a MCC course.
OAA have 2 B.737 jet transport trainers and FTE 1 Hawker Jet trainer.

To be recommended at either school you need to be totally committed and achieve good ground school and flying grades, a first series IR pass is essential.

As a previous poster said budget for a retake of the IR as this is expensive, mainly because of the examiner fees.

Look at the Job figures off the internet for both schools they can tell you a story of who goes where.

Those who have taken a long time to get a job, and are still looking from OAA get their IR renewed for free in the first year as well as getting a 2 hour brush up simulator for free after 6 months.
I am unsure if FTE offer similar !!

Its your choice, but value for money or reputation need to be carefully considered.

Night_fr8 + Skintman Careful chaps, all the cool kids on here say OAT is pants so they must surely be correct in every single instance and every other FTO is perfect? LOL

Guy's I'd just like to focus on Type Rating costs. If you take the OAT placement statistics as of today then Ryanair are the lead recruiter of OAT students from 2007 (57) and so far in 2008 (11).

I recently completed my TR with Ryanair and the cost overall was approximately £25,700. This included:

TR cost inc. Dutch VAT
An extra sim plus retest after an initial partial on the LST. (You must budget for this!),
Reasonable accommodation (e25 per night),
Spending money for food,
Flight's to and from Amsterdam.

(All at today's exchange rates when the money was spent in Euros)

Add this to WISH2FLY's calculations and you get an estimated total of approximately £103,000.

This is a snap shot and peoples costings will be slightly different. I highlighted Ryanair as an example as the majority of OAT guys go there.

Other airlines have different Type Rating arrangements. You may get free accommodation and other allowances. With the vast majority of airlines you will likely be bonded which means they give you extra money (normally tax free) on top of your salary to pay the bank back for the type rating costs (usually over 5-7 years). It still means you take on the risk and you have to find the money and pay it all up. You will then be on a cadet salary as a result. You then have to pay your £75,000ish initial training costs out of that.

Other snap shots..

Flybe will give you a free type rating but the salary is very low. I don't know how the guys can sustain themselves. Maybe people who have gone the integrated route and arrived at Flybe as a cadet can give us the lowdown?

BA and BMI (i believe) will give you free (i use that term loosely) Type Ratings. Whilst I'd be very pleased getting a place with BA the cadet salary is again initially about £28,000 pa (not inc allowances and flight pay etc).

My point isn't to micro analyse different packages but to say DON'T FORGET TYPE RATING COSTs! A more realistic figure to band around for overall training costs to become an airline pilot (if you go for OAT/FTE/Cabair. Not CTC as the TR is free) is about 100k for the lot..

I forgot to mention that beer money is included in the above.. :}

Diamond Dog,

It is fair to say that Ryanair was the leading recruiter of OAT grads last year, but not fair to say the majority went there. 57 of 253 is 22%, but not a majority.

There are only a few on the list that pay for Type Ratings, BA, BMI and FlyBe are the only ones I know for sure do, except for the OAT cadet schemes. The same goes for FTE as far as I can tell.

You rightly point out the lower salary at FlyBe. The same goes for BA, but the very good flight pay makes up for it.

A main difficulty, with Ryanair is the low pay during line training (others being contractor vs. employee and perceived poor T&Cs). I've had difficulty nailing the figures down, so I am interested in whether you can share them. What is the pay before the line check? I hear it goes to £32K after, plus sector pay. What do years 2-5 look like? I assume the numbers get pretty good at some point or fewer OAT grads would be going there. Is that a safe assumption or do they just go to get the 900 hours a year so they can unfreeze and move on?

Other options
 

No-one has mentioned the fact that you could go the modular route rather than integrated. If you went, as I did, through Stapleford you could save yourself a chunk. Many of their students have gone on to jobs at Ryanair and elsewhere.

http://www.flysfc.com/listentoourstu...ommercial.html

And, no, I don't work for them!

I don't know where you go after an intergrated school, highly in debt, and 200h on your CV and no type rating.

last year, I met a guy who spent all his cash in one of these integrated schools.He asked me where he can get a job.
I suggested him to do a FI license or rent an aircraft and build hours, he told me he was broke and all he got was to work in a restaurant but he didn't want to do that!

a few months later, I met a young chap from Germany, did an integrated flight school right after his "habitur"(high school degree), he has no job, no profession as a back up. He failed to pass some psy tests for an airline ,
he told me, what he did was crazy!and he should have go to Uni or learn a profession before touching a plane.

The amount of people who have done the APP (Arrogant pilot programme), which end up at ryanair is laughable. Not being funny, but do you really need to spend all that money on your hotshot integrated course to get a job there? No disrespect intended to any ryanair guys, I suspect most of them are laughing at you.

Tell me, is it a kick in the teeth when you do not get the BA job? You are all mad.

Shaun Ryder,

I've done the APP and have a job with Ryanair. I don't give a monkey's that i didn't get BA mate! It's one of those things that it's a good experience to be invited along, yes it would've been nice to get it, but hey ho that's the way it goes. To be honest with you it wasn't a kick in the teeth at all, it's something you get over!!

As for the guys at Ryanair laughing at us, well to be honest with you, i'm not so up myself that I give a :mad:hit what people think! At the end of the day I have a job flying a jet, whether it's with Ryanair or BA, i'm flying and am happy to do so!

JJ:ok:

Sorry, but I could not help but chuckle at your response old chap. I was only wondering what it felt like to come from such a privileged background i.e OAT, then have to pay your way into Ryanair after all that money spent? I always thought that you guys were the top guns of the industry and landed all the cream jobs. Reality is, anyone i.e modular, can apply successfully to your current airline without the 100K hell debt that you probably have.

To be honest mate, I don't remember mentioning that I was £100k in debt??

I had very little flying experience before joining OAT and so wanted an all in program, just a personal choice to be quite honest. The APP although not as brilliant as is advertised, it got me my licence and did what it said on the tin. It was also the quickest way to get an airline job, which after all is why one embarks on such a course. There's no doubting that the level of training here in the UK and quality of instruction is outstanding, but the same can't be said for the Goodyear facility (the term cowboys come's to mind, no pun intended!)

To be honest with you it doesn't bother me that modular guys can get a job too, in one way it's a good thing, after all it provides an interesting conversational topic on the flight deck!!

It's true that some of the guys get outstanding jobs, the majority of us find the jobs for ourselves. In fact I plead with new comers going to OAT or whatever they call themselves these days, don't fall for the rubbish that they will find you a job, they don't!! A few lucky guys get something, but not all of us!! Do your homework and don't fall for the marketting and employment stats!!

To all those about to embark on training and go to OAT, you really will enjoy the training, the majority training standard is outstanding and the MCC/JOC is the best bit of the course, when you're done send out the cv's don't rely on OAT for anything!!

The very best of luck guys and girls:-)

JJ:ok:

JetSetJ,

Did you find the RyanAir job on your own initiative or did OAA assist you in finding it?

I have a provisional start date at OAA in October this year and was just wondering that with the majority of students thus far in 2008 finding employment with RyanAir I find it hard to believe that all students found employment off their own backs. But on the other hand I also understand that quite a few of them do.

Regards,
CC

Hi,

I went to a Ryanair open day and handing in my CV that way. Then I contacted their recruitment department via email and organised it all of my own back.

I think there are almost 20 guys now this year who have gone to Ryanair. I would suspect that the majority of them emailed their CV's to Ryanair and organised assessments. Ryanair did a presentation at the school and some guys handed in their CV's to the recruitment personnel.

Although a lot of thanks goes to the 'general' in the careers department. He is worth his weight in gold!! He is so helpful with everything from CV's to preparing for an interview with which ever airline you apply for! He is definately the star of the careers team!! I have no doubt that without his hard work the employment stats would be a lot lower!

JJ:ok:

Thanks for the prompt response JetSetJ.

Just another quick question...did OAA assist you when applying for BA or any other airline?

I'm just trying to gauge the level of assistance at OAA. Surely they must have some involvement otherwise they wouldn't be marketing the careers and employment services in their brochures.

Cheers mate.

Regards,
CC

P.S. it would be good to have your email add and vice versa to keep in touch with a student who's "been there done that". If you can PM if it's possible (not too familiar with PPRUNE website) and I'll do the same. Cheers.

Yes,

OAT help you write your CV during First Officer Fundamentals and then you email them to careers who email them to BA.

If BA want to interview you, they'll contact you via email with all the instructions.

You'll do well at OAT, like i say don't rely on them to find you a job. The UK setup is outstanding, the US not so outstanding, but you'll have an awesome time out in the states:-)

JJ:ok:

Shaun Ryder
Your sneering and condescending attitude towards some contributors adds nothing to the debate and is rather immature. You seem to have some axe to grind against OAT. People must make their own minds up where and how they want to learn to fly. Your way is not always everyone's way or the best way. Impartial advice is what people need.

Like or loathe OAT, the ailines like what OAT produces and they continue to take recruits from them. So why the complaints. OAT publish their charges, invite candidates along to open days etc, etc. So they know what they're getting into.

Many young pilots are willing to take any job as their first job, just to get them on the ladder. Why all the venom against them?:=

Skintman

As previously mentioned visit all training schools and decide where you are going to feel most comfortable training.

I got accepted for FTE / OAT / CTCicp and chose FTE.

Tough decision to make which way to go but here are some of my reasons for choosing FTE:

• Thought the learning environment would suit me better at FTE.
• Finance for FTE is for the full amount compared to that of OAT therefore don't have to find as much cash to start with.
• Liked the work hard play hard attitude of everyone I met out there.
• 1.5euros a pint with ice cold glasses.
• Nice living accomodation.
• Not to far from the beach.

As you can see it was mainly based on where I would prefer to live for 14 months. The grades you get at the end are really up to you they both give you the tools is up to you how you use them.:ok: