So talk of “the furure” with the daughter has started, careers, training, university etc.
The airline industry seems to be ever growing and someone is going to have to fly the big sky buses/lorries that are planned for production. I mentioned this and she actually seemed interested in something for once. So how do you actually go about it? As we’re not a super rich family dumping 10g on flying lessons isn’t really an option. RAF I suppose is an option but that sent Mrs ws a shade of white. Do the likes of BA recruit youngsters and train or do you do all the leg and cost work first?

A friend started as cabin crew and took lesson and course, used long stay trips to gain flying hours in cheaper countries.
10k is no where near though think he’s close to triple that.

There are academies that I think BA and virgin do. I may be wrong though.

https://www.itv.com/hub/easyjet-inside-the-cockpit/2a4829

Have a £100k plus to hand

A lot come out of training with debt with a view to paying it off once working. Is it really a sensible long term career though? Fully automated planes can’t be too far off. Planes have been flying themselves for years. The FiL quit flying commercially as it was boring him, so little to do once in the air. I suspect as planes get smarter the role of the pilot will be devalued. Sorry to sound a bit negative, especially when you’ve found something she’s interested in.

My mate got a flying scholarship with the air training corps then did a degree in aeronautical engineering.

Got a bit lucky n flies for BA

So there’s not many working class pilots then 😆

Encourage her, fantastic opportunity and the world of flight needs more women involved in it.

Sod the cash, try scholarships or bursary routes, collage/uni aeronautical collages and don’t limit looking in the UK only, you may have to search all over the world.

Best of luck, fantastic to hear about this.

Wouldn’t be a career I would choose.

Just go on to the websites of the big companies I’m sure they will show the various routes to getting qualified.

You have to be good at passing exams to do it, work unsocial hours, be exposed to radiation, like large debt, although the rewards come relatively quickly. Two mates of mine did it from Uni. One still flies as a Captain, the other gave it up as his body clock couldn’t cope with multiple time zones.

And they hate being called bus drivers for some reason …

Do the likes of BA recruit youngsters and train or do you do all the leg and cost work first?

Buddy, my wife is a BA captain and in the past was also a college liaison pilot. She knows all about BA’s future pilot’s programme. She also had her private pilot’s license by age 18.

She would love to help you and your daughter and is happy to have a conversation on the phone, which is probably the easiest way to help.

My email is in my profile; drop me a line with your number and we can arrange for her to call you.

Friends who I have who are commercial pilots have all gone for forces route (Fleet Air Arm
and RAF). I believe the budget airlines have a training programme ? Note mate who foies for EasyJet preferred that as he’s back home in his own bed every. night. Fromnwjat I understand pay and conditions are not what they used to be
especially for new joiners

As above you need much much more than a PPL, lots of hours after

My friend recently qualified with Easyjet, he quit his job as a lawyer with the local authority to do it.

Basically no income for the period of training and I think he might have had to fund his travel, he did end up in Arizona for getting his flying hours in.

Our swimming coach was thinking about doing pilots training as well but the £300 fee for the assesment course kind of put him off.

We stayed at a B&B in the Pyrenees where the husband was a pilot for KLM flying out of Toulouse. He made the job sound far from glamorous and more akin to a glorified bus driver. He stated the usual route in now was a trainee with a budget airline, long contracts on low pay compared to what he earned. He had started out in the Dutch airforce but said that route into commercial airlines basically didn’t exist anymore.

Friend of mine has thrown all in to her 14 year old sons ambition to be a pilot.

They are putting everything into one lesson a month, by the time he is ready to fly solo he will be 16 and legal. They are very ‘anti’ the forces route. He also hangs around the local Flying club alot, helps out with anything, gets the odd trip up (as a passenger) from other pilots who are just clocking in their time.

No idea how it will pan out, or what happens when he changes his mind in a couple of years time…

If you’ve got the money (or are willing to take on the debt), then go for the EasyJet route. It’s also likely that BA’s own “sponsorship” scheme will re-open within the next couple of years, and there’s fairly likely to be demand from Eastern European carriers for pilots, and they’ll take people going down the modular route if that’s the option you go for.

You don’t just have to fly. Even before getting a command (and rumours were that people were getting them after 18 months in the company at BA a couple of years ago) you can go into training / management / recruitment / other safety roles. It’s definitely not about raw hand-eye coordination anymore, more careful management of systems and other people. Anyone who’s seen me attempt to catch a ball will testify to this. She needs to be good at diplomatically getting her own way!

It’s the most heavily regulated job you can do. Does she struggle being tested? I’m tested in the simulator twice a year in a pair of 2-day sessions; a further day for route-specific training, a day of SEP with the cabin crew, a further two days for flight safety, and a written test every year along with a medical / ECG. If anything happens, it’s investigated to find out why and to prevent it happening again.

You do get your body clock messed with, regardless of short haul or long haul. She’ll go from going to bed at 2 am to getting up at 3 am 24 hours later, and then be working a 12 hour day. Then throw in complicated airports, weather, technical problems, passenger issues etc and you then see why it’s quite a stressful job.

However, I’m paid more than three times the average salary and get to explore pretty much every major city in Europe with someone else picking up the tab. I also get to step onto the crew bus at the end of the trip and immediately stop thinking about work, which very, very few people in my pay bracket can do. The company is not permitted to contact me on my days off. Also pretty good when you whack on full power on a miserable day and three minutes later burst through the cloud into a stunning sunrise.

So, to summarise – she doesn’t have to go down the integrated route, but it is more convenient. She should start attending aviation-specific recruitment fairs, and if really serious and old enough, visit the flying schools. Oh, and try a trial flight somewhere. £150 for 30 minutes or so with an instructor will get some useful feedback.

It needs to be a carefully considered decision. I’d do it again in a flash, but I also wonder what could have been (I studied physics at uni, could have gone on in that direction).

You also have one, or two, or two hundred, or five hundred people literally putting their lives in your hands. The first thing I see when I step into the flight deck are the microphones for the cockpit voice recorder. Something to dwell on. My biggest fear (and the thing I have nightmares about) is accidentally doing something at work that results in someone getting hurt, or worse.

OP if you want to see if your daughter likes the flying side getting some experience flights in on gliders is much cheaper than powered.

Easyjet pilots make £60k pa ?

A lad I used to work with a while few years ago in a totally unrelated job. Decided he wanted to be a pilot, at the time his training cost about 50k, i know he got some kind of bursary/Grant/loan for most of it. He did a lot of exams/tests whilst he was still working at our place, but once he had passed them he went out to Nevada for x months to learn how to fly. He had no previous flying expierance before that. I’m sure the whole thing took about 2 years to complete, and although he wasn’t guaranteed a job afterwards, he pretty much walked into a pilots job at Ryanair, he was saying the major airlines virgin/ba etc though needed so many flying hours before he could get a job with them.

I’m still friends with him via Facebook and it looks like he is permantly on holiday.

School friend of my wife’s found it was easier to get into flying cargo than people and did that for a good few years, before moving to short haul people flights for more civilised family life. She started off flying gliders as a hobby. There was a big chunk of debt involved to become commercial but not dissimilar to the 3x 9k + living expenses that going to a good English uni would cost now, especially if there is a way to stay at home.

The RAF is probably not as scary a prospect as your wife thinks, but your daughter would need to be prepared to kill people, including inevitable risk to civilians, to do it – which if she has never mentioned the forces before is quite a leap.

I doubt we’ll see the abandonment of pilots in your daughters working life, but we might see their role diminished and the number of people on the flight deck reduced during her career. I still think there is another generation of chopper pilots to come through before drones make a significant impact on that area too.

Thanks very much for all the replies. It was just dinner time musings that is slowly becom8ng something she needs to think about. 15 years old as we speak incredibly studious around exam times, hitting the likes of 94 percent in a recent sports science paper which required lots of memory type study, but still likes to go out with her mates.

Getee that’s a really kind offer and I will speak to her to see if she would like to do that, and hopefully she will say yes.

As a dad at the end of the day I want to put every feasible opportunity her way but she has to be up for it.

US military has a pilot shortage crisis, they love brits.

I think you have to have the right kind of attitude for military flying. I’ve been told by ex-military pilots that I’m far too subversive to have ever made the air force. 😀

My brother-in-law got most of the way through the training then 9/11 happened and they stopped all recruitment for a while. Think he was close to £30k in debt.

At the same time a friend on his course fell out of the sky during a training drill which was the nail in the coffin of his pilot dreams.

I’m tested in the simulator twice a year in a pair of 2-day sessions;

We call the two week period prior to this ‘pre-simstural’. Usually I just make myself and the kids scarce.

Ex GF’s brother trained as one. Cost him about £80k all in and couldn’t get a job as a pilot in the end…..

Expensive hobby.

IIRC did most of his training in South Africa as it was cheaper than the UK.

@flaperon, your head is not big enough to be a military pilot – certainly not fast jets. Being a pilot was probably the 5th or 6th thing you told me when we met.

As for your eye-hand coordinatation, I’m not one to throw stones, literally I can’t… but watching you fall off your bike when there is nothing there really does make me question how you land an Airbus 🙂

Teen2 is training for his PPL (already solo and will have license before he can drive) – then we will look at options, possibly ATPL modular course. We are paying, but the full course to jet will not be an option. He’s not planning on going to Uni. The Easyjet scheme is an integrated course, where you are selected, pay the £90K and then have a job at the end of the course. There are multiple entry point too if you aren’t first successful. But essentially, the burden of payment falls on the student in all cases.

Based on future pilot needs, I’m hoping for a direct entry scheme with BA or another carrier, and having the atpl will help him ease into a job. If that doesn’t happen, there may be a remortgage at some point.

It does look like a struggle for those not from reasonably well-off backgrounds, to be honest. And he definitely does not want to be a military pilot.

but watching you fall off your bike when there is nothing there really does make me question how you land an Airbus

8)

Not sure if it’s still a viable option but a couple of mates trained as a bonded apprentice at a small freight / charter airline. Earned minimum wage for 3 years ish and had to do all the rubbish jobs but the company put you through your pilot training and got you qualified on some of their planes. Once your bond period was up you either got taken on permanently or found a job elsewhere. They’re both now flying big passenger jets for BA / Aer Lingus via all sorts of interesting places.

just throwing it out there because i’m aware the program exists, and was surprised how little time it took to get the licence, albeit you need hours to fly bigger planes. You can also come visit and ride the north shore, squamish and whistler…

https://www.bcit.ca/study/programs/100adipma#overview

That’s a great offer from Mrs Geetee – she will know a lot more than most.

The BA scheme deducts your training costs from your salary for the first 5 years, so no rich parent required. I believe virgin offer similar.

As already mentioned, gliding is the most accessible way into aviation.

You can fly solo at 14 in gliders and it’s a only a minimum of 10 hours to convert to a powered license once you have your glider wings.

A glider flying lesson for a youngster can be as little £30 for an hour and they might only need 20 or 30….

For the sake of your bank balance, talk her out of it…..

I used to work in jet fuel supply at heathrow, one of the best jobs i ever had. Ok not flying the planes but aviation is fascinating, i still smile when landing and i see the jet fuel tanks.

If she is planning on going to University then the University Air Squadron would be a very sensible option University Air Squadron

It is selective but if she was successful and achieved a place on a Sqn she would be able to get annually an amount of flying for free and also have access to adventure training amongst many other activities.

We’ve a friend who paid her own lessons (£lots) over a few years.
This became an idea to fit for a living, so she took out career loan somehow and went for it.
She is bus driver for Jet2 😉

+1 for gliding to start with. Much more accessible (if you live near to a Glider strip!) and much cheaper. She’ll learn a lot and get a good grounding before starting the expensive bit.
Even once you’ve got the PPL and done your CPL exams, flight test and solo, the CAA then want £460 to rubber stamp the paperwork. Or at least that’s how much it was in 1999. Don’t under estimate the cost – and that’s before any prangs…

Good luck. I make a living out of flying balloons commercially. Working in an office is not an option for me. It’s a lifestyle, not a job.

but watching you fall off your bike when there is nothing there really does make me question how you land an Airbus

Had to laugh at Stansted motorway services a couple of weeks ago when I watched a member of EasyJet flight crew struggle to navigate his way around the milk and sugar station…..i helped him find the stirrers right under his nose 🙂

^^ that’s an indicator of how fatigued a lot of flight crew are.

NATS are heavily recruiting at the moment. Not the pilot route but still aviation.

Another, again quite competitive route, is to go gliding (as others have said) get upto silver certificate (check out the bga website) then convert to ppl and become a glider tug pilot. Living expenses to fly 4-5 hours a day with no costs. Cheapest possible way to build flight time.
Most of the commercial pilots I know got into it because they love flying first and foremost. They then do it for a living, then they come gliding to ‘fly for themselves again’
They are still happier than most groups of people with their jobs though!

@dansw13 Exactly the same thought here.