Craggenmore

If I had my time again, I would have binned OAT and done GS with London Met, CPL/IR down at Exeter (hour building in the US) and then applied for the AQC course with CTC. I would therefore be where I am today and £30,000 richer. And believe it or not, with that kind of a saving I could have even (god forbid) paid for type rating and still had £10,000 left over.

Does that put it into perspective?

As someone said earlier, you pays yer money......

adwjenk

Hi,
As far as i am aware OAT no longer give credit to students with PPL or previous flying experiance!
You stil have to do the same number of hours, you will just progress quicker!
Hope that helps

roll_over

Do you still have to do the skills test?

I was under the impression it tested whether or not you were able to fly?

adwjenk

Hi,

You do a 2-day skills assesment at OAT!
There is a sim check it really isn’t to test your flying ability since a integrated course is designed for students with little or no flying experience!
The sim is just to make sure you can listen to instructions and have a learning curve, also makes sure you have the hand eye co-ordination!

If you want more info on the selection run a search on PPRUNE, or visit the OAT website itself!

African Drunk

20 full time instructors for 130 students not many places can boast of such good ratios.

will fly for food 06

Hello,
i just wondered if anyone else had been invited to the opening and are going upto oxford aviation next weeK?

thanks

badboy raggamuffin

I shall be there, with my dad who will at the end of the day hand over a 60k wad of cash in order that I can have Oxford on my cv and be "fastracked" into a job with BA. We are looking forward to finding out how wonderful the place is and how people from other schools have absolutely no chance of finding an airline job and will leave content and feeling privelidged that OAT are doing me a favour by allowing me onto their course. C u there!

YYZ

Invited? Is this for one of the seminars they hold every month? Or something else..

YYZ

BobbyK

I got that email! Must be for anyone whos applied there I think. Im not gonna be able tomake it though although I did get a tour whilst I was their and saw there lovely new briefing room almost finished

rogueflyer01

Yup i did. Its only about their new jet thingy opening but i am not going as i have better things to do ....

will fly for food 06

cool see you there, enjoy, got the money ready just going to look at my options, i still havent left my previous flying job, got a few months left with them!

Robbed_60Grand

A few things you wont hear from Oxford but I wish I knew prior to going there. Their average course size is 25 people per month, that equates to 300 students a year. If you look at the “Employment Statistics” section on their website, graduate jobs for 2006 currently stands at 141 that equates to a successful graduate employment figure of 47%

From my experience Oxford career services should only be claiming that they have managed to gain employment for the following companies BA, BA Connect, Excel, FlyBe and Jet2, which is a grand total of 61 jobs (21%) according to their latest web site figures (2006) If you take into account the GECAT scheme where you have to pay ₤500.00 for an assessment and then fund your own type rating, then you have BMI, BMI Baby, Easyjet and Thomas Cook which totals 33 (11%) but this is more a GECAT success than Oxford career services. Combining these 2 figures together (being generous towards OAT) it comes to 32% graduate employment. A further 47 (16%) of graduates have managed to gain employment from their own initiatives. This leaves 159 (52%) students without jobs, zero help from Oxford careers services and a whopping debt yet you have paid over the odds for a careers service that is no where near as successful as it claims to be.

To be in this 32% there are some un-written rules that you will not be aware of when you start your APP course. To stand any chance of the selection board giving you a recommendation at the end of your training you need to have ground school first time passes with an average of 85+% you will need “3” or better in all flight tests and a first series IR. Any mistakes along the way during your training will rule you out of receiving any recommendation from OAT’s selection board. Even if you do achieve this standard your face needs to fit, they have to “decide” to like you and you have no control over this.

You need to also be aware of the EPST (European Pilot Selection & Training) Dutch contingent, they get preferential treatment especially when being put forward for jobs due to contractual obligations between then and Oxford, so any English student is immediately disadvantaged.

The 16% who find employment through their own imitative were binned by Oxford yet when Oxford hear of their success, they suddenly pull your name out of the bin and proudly put it on their “Graduate Jobs Board” and put you in as a statistic on their web site as if you are one of their success stories.

Overall you have a less than 1 in 3 chance of successfully being employed through OAT

The actual school and their training I have no problem with however I take issue with the misleading marketing spin they employ, you believe that you are paying a premium for the use of OAT’s many contacts in the airline industry, their careers service and the so called employment boom that is apparently about to happen in the next month or two (after 2 years of this it wears thin!!)

If I knew all these facts before going to OAT, I would have perhaps gone elsewhere and definitely have gone down the Modular route as the truth about the integrated course is just hype and does not deliver a job in the fashion they would have you believe. Taking the cheaper modular route will mean that you will still spend the ₤60,000+ but included in this cost will be a type rating that you will most probably have to pay for.

Other schools integrated courses may be similar, I don’t know, I can only comment on my own experience, This post is not intended to just slate Oxford, I feel it is important for any wannabe to know that before parting with a huge sum of money that you know precisely what you are going to get for that money and the fact that there is a very good chance that you will graduate and then be left to your own devices with a monumental debt. You very quickly become the forgotten Oxford student; there are many of us out there!

One final piece of advice: Read between the lines of all the marketing spin thrown at you! At the end of the day it’s your decision and you need to be able to live with that.

will fly for food 06

Thanks, some interesting reading. I am trying not to rush into anything with my ATPL and look at all the schools.

Captain Spam Can

Excellent post, I often thought half of the students who have gained employment on there website have done it through GECAT so they funded there own type rating (about £21000) and then a few have gone to Ryanair again funding there own training, both of these places accept Modular students providing you pass selection, then there’s bound to be a few who have done it of there own back, so that leaves a few who OAT have secured employment for, compared with the number of pilots they train a year that’s not many. What makes me laugh though is the guy they use in the picture standing in front of that private jet (Canadair CRJ I think??) was a modular student with them who found employment himself, but wrote in to Oxford telling them and sending a Pic!!! I have had a look around Oxford and I think that there an excellent training organisation and I wouldn’t mind doing the Ground School there but as for jobs at the end….”Don’t believe the Hype” (Public Enemy Quote!!!)

dlav

Robbed 60_Grand, as a current APP student, I would like to hear a little more about your situation. I am currenlty in Goodyear half way through my initial flight training.

I would like to know how you performed at Oxford, ie Groundschool results, flying test reports, IR atempts etc, and if you have had any airline interviews?

I sympathise with you entirely, and I can imagine its not a nice situation to be in. If you would rather PM me thats fine.

Wishing you all the best
dlav

Robbed_60Grand

I am not going to be too specific… to protect my identity (just in case they ever do feel the need to give me one of their valued recommendations, I won’t hold my breath LOL!!!)

I consider my results at Oxford as more than reasonable.. I passed all ground school exams with and average between 80 to 85% (cant be too specific) had a couple of resits that were passed at the next try. On the flying side of things I passed all flight test's first time and have a 1st series IR. I thought my report from the school read quite well, I did not cause any trouble and got on with everyone both OAT staff and students. Even though my report reads quite well, it does not read well enough for the OAT graduate services to consider putting me forward to any airlines. So apart from a couple of % and resits at ground school, I was not that far away from the unwritten rules I mentioned previously.

When you first graduate you call the careers team weekly all upbeat but as time progresses you realise they are just fobbing you off and that you are just wasting your time and that if you didn’t call them, they certainly wouldn’t call you!!

To date I have still not had a single interview, having the Oxford APP name on my CV has counted for absolutely nothing. If you have to send out CV’s on your own it really is a total waste of time, even getting a rejection letter seems like an achievement! Around 2 years on (not being specific on time) I never once got a phone call from their careers team, I hope that some how some day I can achieve that break myself.

So what do I do in the mean time? Well you have to live and somehow pay back a mountain of debt so I now working in a office from 9-5 and 4 evenings through the week I work at my local tesco's stacking shelves. This is just so i can keep on top off my debt and trying so very hard to save some more money so that i can start a FIC to keep aviation experience current, its hard to spend another 6k on a job that will not pay, but what else can I do, Im on my own. I have spoken to local companies and they have basically said that once qualified they “may” be able to give me a few sunday afternoon students.

The only advice I can give you is make sure that you are meet or are well above their unwritten rules, otherwise you’ll be in a very similar boat as are a lot of APP graduates

Rob’d

Wee Weasley Welshman

Robbed - thank you for sharing your experience with us all. Most illuminating and a tale that I have heard many times for many years. My advice has remained that it is better to save £20k, go modular at a good school and then be in either less debt or buy a type rating or get GECAT or CTC to help you over the wall into the airlines. Or approach a smaller air taxi operator and offer to self fund a rating.

Integrated does work for some and they would be the first to promote the benefits. I think though that it doesn't work for the majority and your figures suggest just that.

I also think the selection procedures for recommendation are weak. A perfectly good pilot can fluff his IRT or partial his CPL or just scrape their weakest exam subject. A total prat can ace the lot. And to be honest it makes not a jot worth of difference when you get to line training. A student I know of who was the ace of his course got chopped on line training. Similarly a student who actually ripped of a nosewheel, twice, whose navigation was more luck than judgement and who was sick if you went past a 30 degree bank angle has just completed their command course last month I hear.

Its more the person and their character and their motivation that is important. Unfortunately I think very large schools are uniquely bad at getting to know their students. Its a huge sausage machine and one course looks very similar to another on the conveyor belt.

I flew with someone the other day who had done the whole Modular course for £42k from scratch by various means including buying into a syndicate aircraft. All in the UK, all at Little Piddlington in the Marsh School of Flying, and he is about £40k up on some others I have seen.

Thats a good house deposit.

Good luck,

WWW

porridge

WWW – that’s about the best summation of what it is all about. You are correct to say that it is much about personal management of career progression. Having someone manage it for you, for a fairly hefty premium, is an option, but sometimes not good enough to get the job. These big schools scarcely put their mouth where the money is.
Recently I heard that airlines are now looking quite seriously at us lowly instructors again (I wonder why, maybe it is a personality and Multi-crew thing). One of the best things I heard recently was about a 51 year-old FI, who had only been instructing for 18 months or so, has got a job as FO on a Citation. He told me that what he though swung it for him is that during his sim check, whilst he was FO to a 26 year old “Captain”; the “Captain” got disorientated and did a level bust and was approaching 30 degress A of B in IF conditions. Said instructor, true to form and instinctively reverting to type, said “I have control”, reduced the A of B and sorted the level problem, and then handed control back to the “Captain”. Well I might be wrong, but that is what MCC is all about.
I also heard that in a recent examiners meeting, the Chief Examiner commented that the airlines are looking very favourably at the 1000 hour plus instructor.
Food for thought or what?

tescoapp

Another thing to note about those satistics.

They arn't just intergrated students. Its anyone who has done any training at OAT. Be it Ground school, distance learning or flying.

I had phoned up Steve C when I got my first job to tell him the good news. And that year of the 5 people who were claimed by OAT on there website for our company. Two of us were mod ground school, one full time ground school, one did his cpl with OAT then went to exeter for the IR. And only one had done an Intergrated course but he had instructed for 1.5 years before getting the job.

http://www.oxfordaviation.net/employment_stats.htm

And to be honest looking at the list of companys there are some very noticable omissions/ very low numbers in comparision to numbers of first job pilots being taken on. Flybe, eastern and BMI regional being a prime examples.

And i notice they have removed the previous years results could it be they don't want people to see that during the greatest high in pilot recruitment in the last 10 years the number of OAT pilots getting jobs is actually dropping?

rogueflyer01

Very interesting posts gentlemen! Thank you for the useful info robbed and i hope it all works out for you.

I have just been offered a place on a app course and i was all up for getting into a huge amount of debt but after reading your post i shall indeed think twice before i sign on the dotted line.

The modular route (via Egnatia) is looking more and more attractive as the days go by...