CTC or OAA?

[Fan Marker]

Buggington, take Baracus' advice. If you get a shiny new fatpl you will be unemployed for a long time and you will have a massive debt. Do not believe the school's lies about there being lots of demand for you. All the schools care about is your cash. You will not walk straight into a super duper airline job.

I suggest you read some of the pathetic postings on this forum from desperate, skint individuals who all fell into the trap.

Get a proper qualification and a proper career elsewhere. Take up flying as a hobby. By the way, if flying is not already your hobby, you are definitely barking up the wrong tree.

[Contact Approach]

If Ryanair are closing their recruitment doors on the 1st of April, OAA is a dead route. CTC are your only bet; just be sure you can pay the £1,200 a month BBVA repayments that shortly follow you finishing training, as well as keeping current on both flying and medicals. (The IR annual renewal is just under 2 hours at around £400 hr not inc approach/landing fees. To keep current I believe it's 12 hours every two years.)
When you factor in rent, living costs, travel expenses, loan repayments you're gonna find it hard to even manage that never mind think about expensive hours in the air! Expect to be in the hold-pool for well over a year before being charged extra to start type rating... unless you're "lucky".

Good luck!

[pilotatlast]

I would say CTC as you are more likely to get a job. They also focus on high quality airline style training where I don't think the same can be said for the competition!

[FBOZH]

None of them. Look at the cadet's T+C's in european airlines; You'll have a few hundred pounds to live on every month, if that, at least for the first year. Then as it stands today you won't have any job security for the first few years; Unless you want to become a bush pilot somewhere for the fun, choose another career. It's not what it used to be, and will only go downhill from here!

[pilotchute]

Placed?

Flaps 15,

You say CTC have "placed" cadets at Cathay, Qatar and Vietnam Jetstar. Getting placed at "assessment" stage as you put it isn't a job offer. A University in Queensland Australia also "places" some of it's students from it's flying course at Cathay stage 1. Something they could have got by simply applying on line like everyone else with a fATPL.

I went on the the CTC website and must say that it looked very slick. What it didn't have on it was anything saying they had an affiliation with Qatar, Cathay or Vietnam Jetstar. That would lead me to believe they have no power to "place" anyone with these airlines. What is more likely to have happened is Qatar and Vietnam Jetstar may have asked for some "handpicked" cadets so these two airlines could see if recruiting direct from a flying school would be feasible for them in the future. Seeing as they don't appear on the CTC website now I wouldn't use the "my mate got into Qatar after going to CTC" as a reason for you to go there.

Air New Zealand took some CTC cadets (4) a while ago but decided against recruiting fresh CPL holders after if was found that it was too expensive to get them up to standard as opposed to the people they were sourcing already from traditional means.

China Airlines also tried this with some Oxford cadets in 2007 and didn't continue with the scheme either.