MPL experiences from students
Good point. I am continually amazed that aerobatics is conflated with structured uprt. They are quite different or should be.
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Absolutely correct. Sadly there are still a lot of organisations in the industry - ATOs, airlines, regulators, TRI/TREs, flying instructors and some UPRT ATOs - who are a long way away from understanding what ICAATEE, LOCART, IATA, ICAO and EASA through two RMGs resulting in Decision 2019/025/R for UPRT in FSTDs and 2019/005/R for on-aircraft UPRT are trying to achieve.
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Regular acro is a building block necessary before any meaningful UPRT. It's maintaining an oriented picture of the world with respect to yourself now, a picture (or several) for the future, and acting on that picture with appropriate control inputs.
Doing that (which in itself can be disorienting and overwhelming for many) in a planned manner with some time to sort out the pieces in your mind, is a prerequisite to doing the same except with no planning, and suddenly being thrown into the situation. That's a hundred times more disorienting and overwhelming.
It's like, you do a rectangular course over a farm field with a student before starting into circuits, right? (Well, maybe not, I don't know what you do in Europe, but go with me here.) A circuit has all the elements of a rectangular course, plus so much more. You give them a chance to learn those elements, before throwing the rest at them at the same time. You wouldn't say that the 2 maneuvers shouldn't be conflated because one doesn't have "the real world challenges" of the other. Or, say, learning how to just track a course at a level altitude before introducing ILS'es...
Doing that (which in itself can be disorienting and overwhelming for many) in a planned manner with some time to sort out the pieces in your mind, is a prerequisite to doing the same except with no planning, and suddenly being thrown into the situation. That's a hundred times more disorienting and overwhelming.
It's like, you do a rectangular course over a farm field with a student before starting into circuits, right? (Well, maybe not, I don't know what you do in Europe, but go with me here.) A circuit has all the elements of a rectangular course, plus so much more. You give them a chance to learn those elements, before throwing the rest at them at the same time. You wouldn't say that the 2 maneuvers shouldn't be conflated because one doesn't have "the real world challenges" of the other. Or, say, learning how to just track a course at a level altitude before introducing ILS'es...
Last edited by Vessbot; 3rd Dec 2020 at 13:39.
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Our MPL students typically struggled during the initial period due to the aforementioned lack of manual handling skills, airmanship, and decision making ability. Many reasons for this of course but it was a definite observed trend.
99% had ironed this out by the 1500hr point and achieved parity with their Atpl colleagues.
Don’t forget, the MPL course IS NOT there to benefit the student. It is cheaper to produce, less time consuming, and ties the student to a prospective airline during the ‘danger period’ where they are most likely to seek pastures new!
There is no need for me to repeat the endless horror stories here, but this years events have proved decisively that this course offers nil protection to MPL student, and should not be your first choice when planning a career in aviation.
99% had ironed this out by the 1500hr point and achieved parity with their Atpl colleagues.
Don’t forget, the MPL course IS NOT there to benefit the student. It is cheaper to produce, less time consuming, and ties the student to a prospective airline during the ‘danger period’ where they are most likely to seek pastures new!
There is no need for me to repeat the endless horror stories here, but this years events have proved decisively that this course offers nil protection to MPL student, and should not be your first choice when planning a career in aviation.
Goaround737 has summer it up. By 1500 hours just about everyone is the same. Some things I was told from instructors at former intergrated schools are as follow,
The argument that the airlines like intergrated students cause they you are a known product is nosense. This is just to convince you that you won't get a job if you go modular.
You will get bad habits if you go modular and airlines don't like it. Another ridiculous statement made by schools to scare you into integrated.
All those people who went bush flying in Africa or instructing must be so full of bad habits they will never get airline jobs!
The argument that the airlines like intergrated students cause they you are a known product is nosense. This is just to convince you that you won't get a job if you go modular.
You will get bad habits if you go modular and airlines don't like it. Another ridiculous statement made by schools to scare you into integrated.
All those people who went bush flying in Africa or instructing must be so full of bad habits they will never get airline jobs!
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Climb 150,
I have worked with cadets for over 20 years and speak from experience rather than “what somebody has told me.” Those airlines that have cadet programmes have traditionally taken pilots with little or no experience into those programmes as a full time course of approved training. That training has traditionally taken 12-18 months. There is nothing new in this, it was happening back in the 1960’s. It was an apprenticeship programme where the school dovetailed into advanced training with the sponsoring airline. The training was by definition always integrated. At the conclusion of the course the student obtained their licence with around 200-250 hours of flying time, but the course was all geared to the receiving airlines requirements.
For pilots obtaining their licence by any other civilian method in their own time, at their own pace, and institutes of their choice the requirements involved a minimum of 700 hours. If you wanted to go “bush flying in Africa” for remuneration you would likely have had a minimum of 700 hours before you ever could! Trust me, I spent thousands of hours doing just that. Airlines wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you had thousands of hours of similar experience, and even when they did it was likely to be on a turboprop or if you were very lucky a small jet.
When JAA (the forerunner) of EASA came into being, they harmonised the commercial licensing requirements (quite distinct to any preference most Airlines had). All forms of remunerated “aerial work” then required a CPL whereas that hadn’t previously been the case ( you could previously instruct for money with a PPL and an Instructors rating). This brought the system more into line with ICAO requirements and indeed those that long existed in the USA under their FAR’s. It didn’t mean that a 250 hour CPL holder suddenly became the airlines golden ticket.
The 200 hour airline pilot is a relatively rare commodity and certainly always has been. The idea that every 250 hour CPL holder is just what the airlines want despite this conspiracy that it depends on a modular/integrated argument isn’t generally true.
I have worked with cadets for over 20 years and speak from experience rather than “what somebody has told me.” Those airlines that have cadet programmes have traditionally taken pilots with little or no experience into those programmes as a full time course of approved training. That training has traditionally taken 12-18 months. There is nothing new in this, it was happening back in the 1960’s. It was an apprenticeship programme where the school dovetailed into advanced training with the sponsoring airline. The training was by definition always integrated. At the conclusion of the course the student obtained their licence with around 200-250 hours of flying time, but the course was all geared to the receiving airlines requirements.
For pilots obtaining their licence by any other civilian method in their own time, at their own pace, and institutes of their choice the requirements involved a minimum of 700 hours. If you wanted to go “bush flying in Africa” for remuneration you would likely have had a minimum of 700 hours before you ever could! Trust me, I spent thousands of hours doing just that. Airlines wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you had thousands of hours of similar experience, and even when they did it was likely to be on a turboprop or if you were very lucky a small jet.
When JAA (the forerunner) of EASA came into being, they harmonised the commercial licensing requirements (quite distinct to any preference most Airlines had). All forms of remunerated “aerial work” then required a CPL whereas that hadn’t previously been the case ( you could previously instruct for money with a PPL and an Instructors rating). This brought the system more into line with ICAO requirements and indeed those that long existed in the USA under their FAR’s. It didn’t mean that a 250 hour CPL holder suddenly became the airlines golden ticket.
The 200 hour airline pilot is a relatively rare commodity and certainly always has been. The idea that every 250 hour CPL holder is just what the airlines want despite this conspiracy that it depends on a modular/integrated argument isn’t generally true.
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You left out the introduction of the BCPL, Bealzebub, and the opportunity for Modular BCPL holders to upgrade to CPL with a BCPL to CPL upgrade course, which put them on a par with the integrated cadets in the recruitment stakes. From that point the genii was out of the bottle and modular and integrated candidates stood an equal chance of employment. To their credit, the modular candidates held up well and the steady and consistent feedback from Andy O'Shea of Ryanair shows that where an airline was open minded enough to consider modular candidates they were as good or bad as the integrated candidates. That put an end to the 'integrated is better' argument, the only thing left for CTC et al was the suggestion that some airlines somehow preferred integrated students and, to be fair, for a while some did but in the end the dominoes fell and nearly everyone (possibly everyone?) accepted both modular cadets and integrated cadets equally. What was left to justify the high prices? Only the MPL. "Train with us and you will be 'tagged' for Easyjet". Yes, that worked for the marketing team, until it didn't. It will be interesting to see how the next surge of demand is satisfied.
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I did Alex, because the BCPL was a very short term phenomenon that wasn’t really relevant. It was a Basic commercial pilots licence that was upgradable as you have said. The CPL (in the U.K.) had been slashed from a (non-approved) 700 hour requirement to a 250 hour licence as it became the benchmark “aerial work licence.” This brought it into line with most other ICAO member states licences. The BCPL was an irrelevance with regards to airline employment. Even in the pre-JAR days a 700 hour CPL/IR holder was going to struggle to find airline employment. The exception was full time integrated students who had come through the “approved school” programmes that were either wholly owned or affiliated to specific airlines with properly structured cadet programmes. Examples being BEA/BOAC/British airways from Hamble. AST Perth, and Oxford, to companies such as Britannia and others.
The BCPL was a short lived stepping stone to the (non-approved) CPL. It wasn’t a bridge to an (approved) course. I never met a holder of one and clearly it’s longevity was doomed at onset.
Pre-JAA, many of the airlines would recruit from three sources. The military was a popular recruiting ground and satisfied a significant proportion of most recruiting rounds. The approved schools supplied an element of recruits into those airlines with affiliated and structured cadet programmes. The remainder was what then referred to as “ Self improvers.” These were (as now) those pilots who had worked their way through the system obtaining their CPL/IR with a minimum of 700 hours and then gone on to work their way through third and second tier jobs to get the experience levels that airlines usually set as benchmark levels for employment. Generally those levels were 2500-3000 hours of which at least 500 hours were “turbine” or multi engine experience. This latter group comprised a significant source of airline employment and produced a great many excellent pilots. Of the three groups, without doubt, the attrition rates were always highest in the “self improvers.”
JAA, as well as slashing the CPL experience requirements also occurred at about the same time as the appearance of the so called “lo-co operators.” Andy O’Shea’s boss famously suggested that two pilots in the flightdeck was (in his view) one two many. The next best thing was to find the cheapest way of putting a pilot there and taking advantage of a large supply of source material was a good way of achieving that aim. This clearly opened up a pathway that hadn’t really existed before. Of course the laws of supply and demand only work to that goal when the source remains plentiful and this clearly opened up the floodgates that remain to this day. Many other airlines sourced their cadets from the modern incarnations of the previously “approved schools” with the added advantage of gradually shifting almost the entire financial risk burden to those aspirants. The growth in these schools with tied programmes expanded to fill the drop in military sourced candidates as that source shrank,
The MPL was an evolution designed to update the “apprenticeship” training of fully integrated cadet programmes. A good idea in principle. The problem was in practice it’s success relied on the economic success of the participating airlines on an individual basis. As I recall, Stirling Airways in Denmark was a primary adopter and its corporate demise highlighted the problem. A problem that has been reinforced many times since then with changes evolving as a result. As an airline apprenticeship on an ab-initio basis, I believe it was a good concept and the results I have experienced certainly bear that out.
as you say, it will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. I would like to see a two path route into airline flying. The basic requirement being either an ATPL (and 1500 hours) for unstructured candidates and an MPL obtained by a full time course of relevant structured training to airline requirements for apprenticeship “cadet” programmes. In many ways this would bring the requirements back to where they existed pre-JAA and to a certain extent where they already are in North America. Whilst awaiting the howls of protest, I would say that if supply becomes problematic I would expect the consumers (airlines) to either have to reach into their own pocket more than they have had to in recent years, or perhaps Mr O’Shea’s boss will be granted his wish from his own personal Genie.
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n...ercial-flights
The BCPL was a short lived stepping stone to the (non-approved) CPL. It wasn’t a bridge to an (approved) course. I never met a holder of one and clearly it’s longevity was doomed at onset.
Pre-JAA, many of the airlines would recruit from three sources. The military was a popular recruiting ground and satisfied a significant proportion of most recruiting rounds. The approved schools supplied an element of recruits into those airlines with affiliated and structured cadet programmes. The remainder was what then referred to as “ Self improvers.” These were (as now) those pilots who had worked their way through the system obtaining their CPL/IR with a minimum of 700 hours and then gone on to work their way through third and second tier jobs to get the experience levels that airlines usually set as benchmark levels for employment. Generally those levels were 2500-3000 hours of which at least 500 hours were “turbine” or multi engine experience. This latter group comprised a significant source of airline employment and produced a great many excellent pilots. Of the three groups, without doubt, the attrition rates were always highest in the “self improvers.”
JAA, as well as slashing the CPL experience requirements also occurred at about the same time as the appearance of the so called “lo-co operators.” Andy O’Shea’s boss famously suggested that two pilots in the flightdeck was (in his view) one two many. The next best thing was to find the cheapest way of putting a pilot there and taking advantage of a large supply of source material was a good way of achieving that aim. This clearly opened up a pathway that hadn’t really existed before. Of course the laws of supply and demand only work to that goal when the source remains plentiful and this clearly opened up the floodgates that remain to this day. Many other airlines sourced their cadets from the modern incarnations of the previously “approved schools” with the added advantage of gradually shifting almost the entire financial risk burden to those aspirants. The growth in these schools with tied programmes expanded to fill the drop in military sourced candidates as that source shrank,
The MPL was an evolution designed to update the “apprenticeship” training of fully integrated cadet programmes. A good idea in principle. The problem was in practice it’s success relied on the economic success of the participating airlines on an individual basis. As I recall, Stirling Airways in Denmark was a primary adopter and its corporate demise highlighted the problem. A problem that has been reinforced many times since then with changes evolving as a result. As an airline apprenticeship on an ab-initio basis, I believe it was a good concept and the results I have experienced certainly bear that out.
as you say, it will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. I would like to see a two path route into airline flying. The basic requirement being either an ATPL (and 1500 hours) for unstructured candidates and an MPL obtained by a full time course of relevant structured training to airline requirements for apprenticeship “cadet” programmes. In many ways this would bring the requirements back to where they existed pre-JAA and to a certain extent where they already are in North America. Whilst awaiting the howls of protest, I would say that if supply becomes problematic I would expect the consumers (airlines) to either have to reach into their own pocket more than they have had to in recent years, or perhaps Mr O’Shea’s boss will be granted his wish from his own personal Genie.
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n...ercial-flights
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I just finished one. Government funded like most education here so no debt at least, which seem to be the only good thing right now. Completed in cooperation with a certain Scandinavian Airline (haha).
B737 rating with 0 hours, ~100 or so on SEP and 170 in FNPTII/FFS.
Not sure what to do now, we're not tied to one airline as some seem to think. We are free to apply wherever, although will probably take a few years until the airlines will start hiring on a decent level. If I knew what the airline industry is like and how vonourable it can be I would have chosen the CPL path instead of the MPL path, I had the choice back in 2019 as there are two sponsored pilot schools with 20 spots per year here, but I chose the MPL road because things were looking good then. Would never ever pay for MPL training, too much risk now in hindsight. I feel my chances of landing a job in the future market is low with the hours I have and a rating with no hours. I have a PPL/SEP rating so I'm guessing my best bet is to do a CPL conversion to be less restricted on where I can apply and how airlines see my application.
Any advice from more experienced people?
B737 rating with 0 hours, ~100 or so on SEP and 170 in FNPTII/FFS.
Not sure what to do now, we're not tied to one airline as some seem to think. We are free to apply wherever, although will probably take a few years until the airlines will start hiring on a decent level. If I knew what the airline industry is like and how vonourable it can be I would have chosen the CPL path instead of the MPL path, I had the choice back in 2019 as there are two sponsored pilot schools with 20 spots per year here, but I chose the MPL road because things were looking good then. Would never ever pay for MPL training, too much risk now in hindsight. I feel my chances of landing a job in the future market is low with the hours I have and a rating with no hours. I have a PPL/SEP rating so I'm guessing my best bet is to do a CPL conversion to be less restricted on where I can apply and how airlines see my application.
Any advice from more experienced people?
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I wouldn't spend any money on a CPL conversion. There are only a few jobs for which a CPL will be beneficial, i.e. you will be the PIC of a CS-23 airplane, and those vacancies will most likely be filled by guys who have a couple of hundred hours more than you. Contrary to common believe, most business jets are CS-25 airplanes, so no advantage there either.
Try to keep your 737 rating current for two reasons: a) there's a good chance that one day you'll be assessed on 737 simulator and for that you should be on top of your game, after all you're type-rated on the airplane, and b) most training departments would like you to have a current ME/IR upon joining, even if it's not strictly necessary.
Try to keep your 737 rating current for two reasons: a) there's a good chance that one day you'll be assessed on 737 simulator and for that you should be on top of your game, after all you're type-rated on the airplane, and b) most training departments would like you to have a current ME/IR upon joining, even if it's not strictly necessary.
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I just feel like many airlines doesn't recognize the MPL for their applicants, most just say CPL ME/IR in their ads. But maybe that is because MPL is probably extremely uncommon in their applicants. Ryanair for example does not hold the MPL as a valid certificate in their cadet program..
Regarding the CPL conversion, i'd keep my rating valid and when you're "unlocking" the MPL for single pilot ops with the CPL the IR/ME comes with it. And everything would be kept valid with the yearly 737 PC, this is why i am considering it. Not sure anyway, one of the good parts is that I would be able to fly single pilot IFR to keep current with those parts and IFR time feels like it would be more attractive to a possible employer. Not sure though as I said, never been to a real interview except the one for school where the airline essentially recruited us.
Regarding the CPL conversion, i'd keep my rating valid and when you're "unlocking" the MPL for single pilot ops with the CPL the IR/ME comes with it. And everything would be kept valid with the yearly 737 PC, this is why i am considering it. Not sure anyway, one of the good parts is that I would be able to fly single pilot IFR to keep current with those parts and IFR time feels like it would be more attractive to a possible employer. Not sure though as I said, never been to a real interview except the one for school where the airline essentially recruited us.
