Financing The Training
 

Now that BBVA have stopped doing pilot loans, what other providers are there?

Thank you

For British citizens, I don't think there are any other specific pilot loan providers.

For Modular training, you can get an unsecured £30,000 loan with 2.3% APR from Nationwide and several other banks offer similar loans. Depending on your background you could get them. You can also remortgage if you have a house or try and ask family members for money.

There is a very helpful page by the Wings Alliance on financing pilot training, maybe take a look at it: https://www.wingsalliance.eu/training/finance/

I am definitely not a financial advisor and everything I've said is based off a google search, for more advice and specific details, you are better off seeing a financial advisor or your bank for advice.

Find a job, work hard, save money and follow the modular route.. If you have job, banks would be happy to lend you money :)

BBVA essentially just offer secured loan like many other high street banks do, with a few nice perks e.g. up to 24 months payment holiday so you don't make payments while training and then up to a further 24 months reduced payments.

The highest unsecured loan I have seen is £50k with First Direct but I don't know how feasible actually getting that loan may actually be lol especially for flight training!

As the other replies have suggested, modular seems to be the only option unless you have the security.

For me it's a self funded PPL, then I'll build up time going flying trips and enjoying flying. After that I will consider taking the biggest unsecured loan out there to do the ATPL ground school, then a CPLMEIR course, some good options going for about £20k.

Thing is, depending on income that could all take a while, it also doesn't account for any extra hours needed/living costs/MCC/JOC/type rating etc etc etc.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing.

Can anyone tell me:
My parent's have agreed to act as a guarantor for a large loan, however, will not put the house up as collateral. Are there any loan providers that would do this, as in, lend me in excess of £50k with parents as guarantors.

No. The largest unsecured loan available on the high street is £50k, repayment is over 7/8 years with payments of around £700 a month starting immediately.

Larger loan products are available but only as secured lending - which is done using housing/property.

There are no large loan products that let you borrow a large sum of money just with a guarantor. The lender will want a cast iron guarantee they'll get their money back which is why it's secured on a home.

My question to you is, if you are taking out a large loan product how are you going to pay for it each month? My next question would be, if you can afford payments of £700+ a month from day 1 then why not spend that money on training directly instead of taking a loan?

Just curious as to why you need 50k plus if going modular and you already have a PPL? Is that to include a type rating also?

Regarding loans from BBVA, I believe that they are one of the only banks in the UK allowing loans for training. They are going to stop offering loans on the 13th of November 2017, I know this as I recently just handed in my application for a guaranteed loan against my parents' house. And for BBVA, I think you need to do training through either OAA or L3.

The ONLY time you should borrow money is once you have a PPL and 150+ hours and all 14 written exams passed. To get to that point, you should try a thing called ‘work’. It won’t hurt you. Remember all that’s doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

To get a CPL-ME-IR should cost somewhere south of £25,000. This is a manageable amount of debt. You would be hard pressed to get it all done from zero to (f)ATPL for £50,000 including living expenses, so borrowing that amount won’t help you. Wouldn’t you hate to run out of money towards the end? Plus you’ll need to have some money left over for a MCC/JOC.

OAA/L3 is for a different crowd. It’s alright if you can’t afford it. Your not missing anything that you can’t find elsewhere cheaper.
As Dring’s parents very well may find out once BBVA forecloses on their house.
What is one of the Ten Commandments?
Honor you mother and your father!
A fine way to do that, by kicking them to the kerb.

Getting a 50k loan is tricky if not impossible, but with decent credit, a 10k loan is quite easy to get. Take out 5 of those on the same day (before the CRAs update) and there's your 50k...

Taking out five loans under false pretenses would be credit fraud, which is illegal.
Great start to a career, “Have you ever been charged with a crime?”

So lets say you do take out five, ten thousand loans before you start training.
You now have £50,000 of somebody else’s money.
Which you now have to start paying the back the next day.
This all eats into the principle.
You’ll be paying the bank back with their own money, whilst you sit and stew in ground school.

Lets say your doing it the ‘Big 3’ school route.
After six months of ground school, with housing, expenses and interest. Your 50 grand, is now down to the low 40s.
Now your off for your PPL, and you are now at 30.
Hour building will cost you another 10 to 15.
Leaving you with 15 to 20 to finish up.

Think about it for a second.
I don't think it can be done.

You are now royally screwed.
Up :mad: creek without a paddle, to coin a phrase.
No money, no credit, and a bank loan that just won't quit.

I can hear you all say that the school in What-cha-mcall-itis-stan says their program is €39,995.
If you believe that, then the world is going to roll you.

Now if you'd only taken your sweet time and done things correctly.
You'd have all your prerequisites completed before ever borrowing any money.
In case you weren’t listening they are PPL and 150+ hours and all 14 written exams passed.
Then its one simple loan, which you can start paying back with your first flying job.

All honest work is honorable work.

How many times do I have to keep saying this.
It seems like I'm banging my head against the wall here.

Some other seasoned veterans of this business are going to have to chime in.
I can't carry the voice of reason all by myself.

I certainly would agree with the post above, only think about borrowing money for the final push - after PPL, ATPLs and preferably hour building. My previous post was in response to a specific question.

Hours building is where gliding experience can, I believe, come in handy. Having such experience makes you much more attractive to a club who is in need of a tug pilot, if you're a member of a club you can put yourself forward. I've seen a couple of people gain a couple of hundred hours towing before going for their CPL/ME/IR. The only thing is that it isn't "structured" hours building.

Would probably take between £10k-£20k off the cost of a licence which, if you're doing modular, is a fair bit.

'Structured' just means that you've made the best use of the time: cross country/night/simulated IMC etc. It's helpful, but not the be-all and end-all. You'll still have a full course to polish you up. Nothing beats free hours!

Let us keep the subject on ‘Financing The Training’.

I don’t care where you get your PPL at. It can be in any country. But to make things simple, I would get a PPL in the country where I was going to do my hour building in. If you have strong ties to any one country with a job and family and a house, then you are forced to stay put. In that case free glider tug hours may be one of the better ways forward. But personally I found hanging out all day at Lasham to get some time in Super Cub G-ATRG to be a waste of my time.

But if your a free spirit, then I can’t think of a better place than the United States. A UK PPL will need a night rating to be transferred to a US PPL. The TSA makes training in America somewhat problematic. Canada is far less hassle. Usually it’s more expensive, but at present due to the high US Dollar against the low Canadian Dollar the US advantage is not so great. But that could change, so beware.

Hour building in the US is great fun. But it’s best to use you time wisely. I’m quite happy just bean bonking around as many airports in a day as I can do. But your supposed to be training and learning, not just goofing around. So make your training routes preplanned and challenging. You should spend many hours on vfrmaps.com going over you planned routes for your odyssey.

You don’t have to do all your hour building in one go. You can break it up into sections and do your ATPL written exams in between. I did mine in three sessions. I would have gone stir crazy doing all the exams at the same time. The flying part is what kept me sane and drove me on. Hour building whilst doing home study is the best and cheapest way.

Then, and only then, are you ready to borrow money for a CPL - IR - ME. You should be able to get it done for around £20,000.
If you need a recommendation try Stapleford Flight Center. If anybody knows Eric Thruston please tell him that a grateful student thanks him.

How rude. Could you have made your point without being personal?

Interestingly, TUI in Belgium have just started the only 'taking pilots off the street' route I have heard of in recent years. They hire applicants untrained, on completion of selection, pay for all the training, then keep them on a cadet salary for a while to recover the cost. They have taken this path because they were unhappy with the quality of pilots being fed to them by certain big schools.

Its an attractive plan, and I'm sure massively oversubscribed. The really interesting bit was that they stood up at a conference in Berlin last week and said "...and now we know what flying training costs, its 55,000 euros, including type rating". Anything else is profit.

There's a massive and obvious issue here. Companies-who-shall-not-be named are producing a generation of pilots in debt, purely to line their own pockets. And not a small, respectable, 'everyone has to make a living' profit, this is obscene. €130K is 'remortgage mum's house' money.

FZRA

Have you managed to find a job as a pilot after ?

"They have taken this path because they were unhappy with the quality of pilots being fed to them by certain big schools."

That's interesting in itself - about the time Air Europe went down there was a move not to take self-improvers but only to take graduates from major schools - of course, that was when they were doing the job properly (i.e. we didn't need KSA 100), and you had to book four years ahead. How the circle comes round!

John Carry, yep, as I said in the opening line of my post above "but instead a lowly FO a couple of years in to the job".

Agree with Alex and Paco, the modular route (or whatever it is called these days) in my experience is a great way to train. You also meet different people in the different locations and environments that you train in, which helps with the contacts side of things later on down the line when you are trying to find that elusive 1st job. It is significantly cheaper and you can tailor most of your training around your life (job, family etc) rather than sacrificing it all to go on an Integrated Course for months. This then leads to the question of financing the training. Well, old fashioned I know, but as some of the posters have alluded to in previous posts, you can work whilst you train with this route or you can save up for it before starting the bulk of the training. Just my 2p's worth.

One thing to consider - if you go modular you get a piece of paper in the shape of a PPL early on in the process, so if you happen to know someone who owns an aircraft or get the chance of a ride you can do it. if you go integrated you generally don't get any paper until the end of the course, if at all.

Sorry hahaha.

I was reading this half asleep.

Good post Alex and especially from someone who is in the training industry.

I listened to you at one of Aeros FastTrack days at Gloucester and being an older person, 38, am seriously looking at the viability of training before it's definitely too late. Have wanted to fly for years but cost was always prohibitive and my situation.

Out of interest, what's the oldest person you've had training for fATPL ground school?

I spoke to someone recently who said if you have the conditional job offer, then sometimes the additional £50-70k can be worth it but not so sure myself...

Pegasus Personal Finance
 

It would appear that a company under the name of Pegasus Personal Finance offer loans for Flight Training, as they put it. Also appears to be in conjunction with a number of schools, Cae Oxford included.

Has anyone had any dealings with Pegasus?

I've not heard of them before but would be interested to hear if anyone's been successful applying for funding through them.

They have been advertised on several websites, but seem to be a worse option than BBVA, considering their high-interest fee.

I was under the impression BBVA had left the pilot loan market altogether?

Aeros
 

Are you doing the aeros fast track? Im looking to work save and then apply for them....

No, unfortunately I've given up on my dream as I'm now 40 with wife and kids and just can't afford the training. Instead I'm trying to get my microlight license on the Eurostar so i can still fly for pleasure.

Sorry to revive this, however, where do you get this less than 50k deal?

Keep an eye out for some scholarships. The Aer Lingus one is ideal, but can’t see them advertising any time soon.

On the subject of dedicated training loans, I imagine that in the coming years those will be non-existent. It's simply too high a risk for the potential lender, especially after a number of cadets from programmes advertised as coming with a secure job in the end got dropped in the past months. Unless the loan is underwritten by an airline and the airline agrees to cover the costs for the lender in case of a hiccup and only then possibly reclaim them from the candidate, it will most likely be a no-go for a long time. And, anyway, why would an airline do that if the supply of either already qualified or self-funding individuals will be more than enough to cover all vacancies for quite a while?

The only wise solution to not having the money for the entire training readily available is good old modular, spread over some years on a pay-as-you-go principle. That option has been around for almost as long as civil aviation has and it has proved to be working for thousands of pilots throughout the decades. For many, that's the only option. For the youngsters it's an especially good option because it will make you stand out as mature and determined in your airline interview. Someone who has actually put some skin into the game will always be more appealing to recruiters than a school kid who simply asked mum and dad for a bag of money to become a pilot. Do not burden yourself with loans and, by all means, never, ever, ever remortgage the family house for something as volatile as flight training! I just can't stress that enough after all the horror stories of schools going under with people's money, cadetships being cancelled at the final stages of training and whatnot else. It's an awful lot better to do everything off your own back rather than take the gamble of borrowing a massive sum of money with no guarantee that you will be able to repay it as quickly and easily as intended.

Agree with PilotLZ, if you really want to go for pilot training nowdays, modular is the way to go.

Suits your own pace, no big cash upfront, and also let's you diagnose how is the industry moving so you can speed up/slow down training if required depending on market and economic conditions. That's how a rational individual would approach the idea of training. I did it that way, and came out in one of the best moments of hiring in commercial ops (2013), and also debt free.. and with that I mean 0 debt.

Then you can also go out and ask for a 100,150k loan and put whatever assets of your parents as guarantee (good luck with that!), with the associated compromise to repay the loan immediately after training, just to find that jobs as a pilot are extremely limited. It would scare me to put myself into such situation. Be careful and smart!

One of the few logical comments I see. I second this completely. Aspiring pilots now should focus on being smart with whatever money they have for future training, this especially applies to integrated courses with fancy sales pitches and lots of upfront reoccurring costs. None of which will guarantee you a job, especially at the moment.

The smartest way to go for the next few years is modular where you can study as little or as much as you like with the ability to put the financial brake on any commitments.