Paying for it!
 

My son is looking seriously at doing the FTE course next year and although I have made tentitive enquiries about paying for the whole caboodle, I would really appreciate anyone's take on the ways to cover the £100k plus costs from beginning to end, bursaries / loans / mortgage / bank robbery etc.....:bored:

Don't forget the additional £25-£30k for a type rating.

Just a note, from a reputation perspective, FTE don't have the best reputation compared to other schools based in the UK (many of which have the benefit of a fair weather base overseas, but still with the connection associated with having a UK base). They used to have a much stronger reputation which has now sadly deteriorated.

Check out funded courses, such as BAA FPP, the Virgin MPL and other part-sponsored schemes.

Also, be sure that your son REALLY wants this, because passion and dedication to the training is what will get him through with minimum cost. If he isn't 100% committed, he will struggle. There are much better career choices than Commercial Flying.

Can you elaborate on that? What has caused this reputation change? I've heard good things about FTE, although I guess they are now outdated. Do you think these differences might affect when doing an MPL as well?

CTC and OAA on a MPL scheme are the way to go. But if I were your son, I would go for a modular route, like I am doing right now. It would have been different if I had been admitted on a MPL scheme, but I didn't even secure a selection after the initial online screening:}

Im rather interested in these comments about FTE. My son is nearly at the end of his ATPL there and I've just come back from a quick visit. I have to say, the whole set up seemed very professional and well organised with plenty of cadets from BA, Emirates, MEA and Aer Lingus to name a few. Surely, if FTEs name wasn't that good anymore, these airlines wouldn't be using them?
I'm also aware that they don't hesitate to ask students to leave if they're not making sufficient progress and that they are very oversubscribed at the moment. Not the usual indicators of a second rate organisation.

Mrs Bws

I think when people are saying it has deteriorated in this sense they mean the job connections for non tagged/sponsored students. OAA and CTC have decent connections to help the individual student get a job, whereas FTE's ability to do this is less.

I know less about this side - but some have said that the instruction quality there is perhaps not as good as it once was. They have had problems retaining good instructors. Not so much of a problem for the sponsored students as they are normally monitored through the course and will be given the best instructors possible as an ATO will likely do anything they can to maintain or create favourable airline ties - but it is the independent student that could suffer from this.

On the other hand, I hear that FTE's customers are very satisfied. If you have some concerns I would suggest that you talk to them - just ask FTE who they are.

phil

Thanks to all for your contributions thus far. As I start out on this 'journey' with my son, can I ask how? what? is tagged?
We have a clean sheet of paper here - what route would most go on and why?

Still no response regarding financing the 'journey'....any takers please?

Don't be blindsided by all the glossy mags of fte and oaa et Al. There are much lower coaster alternatives (lower cost does not equal lower quality!!)

You could do no harm by checking out the newly formed wings alliance, google it.

Makes finance much cheaper, you are effectively nearly halfing the cost that the integrated courses charge! Not to mention you boy can stay at home and not pay accommodation costs.

Money saved then can go towards a 30k+ type rating!

Brilliant - keep it coming.

Looked up Wings Alliance (have to be careful with the google search as there are lots of WA's!). Food for thought and very many thanks for your input on this.

http://www.wingsalliance.eu/

My limited and personal thoughts on modular courses are:

Cheap(er).
Time consuming.
Fractured (the gaps between modules can lead the candidate to 'stray', perhaps dragging the course out and also losing focus).
Do larger airlines prefer integrated instead? (What are pilots views on this having finally made it and looking back?).

Does anyone have info/views on the next 5 year airline employment cycle?
(Global and domestic).

Finally, what are the chances of being tagged these days? Is there anything that gives one an advantage to being tagged?

Thanks again - very grateful for your time.

One of the beauties with modular, is that you set the time scale yourself. You can run every module back to back if your finances and situation allow, or if you need break to save up some more money, you take a break. You pay the schools as you go, giving you less fiscal risk should a school go tits up, (look at what happened to cabair, long established integrated school that shafted kids a few years ago). And if a school is not delivering on its promises, you quite simply take your custom elsewhere, integrated they have you over a barrel on all of these aspects.

I think it also teaches a bit more self resilience and discipline than integrated where you get spoon fed the whole way.

Do large airlines prefer integrated? Depends. Partly on how lazy I think their HR depts have become! On my type rating with a large blue tailed loco this year, about half of us were modular.

One other thing to consider around the costs, is your repayments afterwards. With the way salaries are going you limit yourself on jobs you can accept when you pass, I did some bush flying out Far East, pay was peanuts and couldn't have accepted the job had I had huge integrated bills to cover., yet the experiences gained were priceless. Also when you do get into an airline, chances are you will live somewhere else many miles from home, having to pay rent, and huge repayments, on a low salary, that is even before you have started to dream of buying a house! Oh yeah, let alone having to pay for a type rating.

The money you can save on training, whilst still training at highly reputable modular schools has many many positives.

As another hopeful, I might be able to share what I've learned so far.

Financing, there are three options for integrated, the first is that an airline pays for the course or guarantees the loan for it, the second is that you act as a guarantor by putting your house up as security for the training loan, the third is that your son saves the £100k+ and pays for it himself. Alternatively, there may be a combination of the above.

Many say that the integrated schools have better connections with the airlines due to the fact that they hold more sway when they recommend their best candidates for interview. That said, when no-one is hiring, no-one is hiring. Couldn't offer you a pilot's view looking back.

If a candidate is 'tagged', they are normally selecting for 'tagging' prior to the start of training. If they complete the course to the required standard, they will be taken on by the airline at the end of training (assuming the industry isn't in dire straits). Personally, I'd only do integrated if I was tagged or sponsored, that said, it is competitive.

Recruitment cycles-wise, if BA/Virgin et al are recruiting, everyone else tends to get an opportunity to move up according to what I've heard. That said the industry can literally change overnight.

I would second the above about tagging.

You need to have a broad and realistic view of who is hiring, and what they require. A healthy dose of realism.

BA/Virgin - only hire experienced drivers or take a few lucky very intelligent types from tagged or sponsored courses. You will never walk out of flight training and get hired by these unless previously tagged.

Flybe - take mixture of mod, integrated, tagged, flying instructors and ex military. Risk being that you can become 'trapped' on turboprops (nothing wrong in that! ) as the traditional route of t/p to jet is dying as kids pay for ratings.

Ez/Ryan- Ryan have huge recruitment next few years with over 300 jets on order. Most likely they will be your best chance of a job, if you can pay the 30k plus expenses for a job. Both these guys take mod/integrated, with ez I think a bit more bias towards integrated.

Jet2/Thomson- normally experienced only, bar a few pilot apprenticeship taken at jet2

Logan - take all sorts, bias towards Scottish instructors! Again risk of trapped on turbines.

Bizjets- very much a who you know, and also they normally will always require hours, a tough gig to get a a newbie.

Wiz - preference to Hungarian's, but do take mod and integrated

By looking into airline requirements, you can way up with a bit more scientific basis which route is better to take.

I would suggest your lad also try the military first. Fantastic career.

You're all very kind. Thanks for your time.
Food for thought.

More Q's :ooh:

Is the recruitment cycle over the next few years moving up or down?
CTC / OAA / FTE? (Purely from the end employer perspective / chances of hiring)?
Starting salary for:
IAG (Is the starting salary the same whether you are BA or Iberia / vueling?)
EJ?
Ryanscare?
Flybe / Thomson?

And finally - the $64000 question: How does one get Tagged?

Thanks in advance

TC

For the hiring cycle, watch the economic cycle. It's a reasonable predictor of how the airlines respond.
Of course, how the economic cycle is going is any one's guess.
Aviation is particularly sensitive to financial shocks.

To get tagged you just apply to all the airlines cadetships. Ba, are lingus, virgin(open at the moment), flybe, run them whenever they need pilots. But the catch with these is that you get a lot of people applying so ones chances of getting a cadetship is very slim. Also, with a lot of these cadetships you do have to pay some if the costs yourself which could be anything up to 75% of the 10k total. Ba and aer lingus' cadetships last year were fully sponsored though meaning you don't psy anything

You generally just fill out an application online and then take part in a selection process normally held at one if the flight training schools.

If you go onto CTC"s website you will see a section on all the cadetships currently offered or coming up in the future.

But again as u said already these are extremely hard to get into.

FTE run modular courses with very experienced flying instructors. Ex PIK.

Winter flying probably has the best days of the year to fly.

At a meeting for all the SS students at FTE recently, they were advised that 90% of graduates would have a job within 3 months. Not sure how this compares with CTC etc?

Mrs Bws

I personally would take any claim like that with a healthy dose of skepticism.

"Would" is not the same as "have".
Define "job". Flipping burgers at McDonald's is a job.
Drill down into that claim to get the truth - if they'll ever state it.

Heck VW said that their diesels didn't produce a lot of emissions....

Can I suggest before any money is spent, that a first class initial medical is carried out to rule out any potential issues that may be there.
Kind regards,
Max.