Are FTOs bringing up their game ?

Standard practice in the case of KLM Flight Academy and has been for years

Peter_Mundy wrote:

Standard practice in the case of KLM Flight Academy and has been for years

I always saw them in Rouen, LeToquet, Southend for many years, it’s easy to notice them as the fly 3pob in DA42 with captain strips everywhere…they also do ‘weather flying’

They landed at Southend once, parked, swapped crew, then taxied with 400ft ceiling in ATIS and miserable visibility back to Netherlands…I was stuck that morning at Southend waiting for weather to improve as Stapleford is VFR only. As benchmark, Stapleford ATO usually close their shop for CPL/MEIR cadets training when ceiling is less than 1200ft !

My FTO (Cannes aviation) is doing that since years. France/Italy/Croatia/Switzerland, sometimes farther north.
Integrated ATPL students have plenty of flight hours in MEIR, they planned longer flights than for modular.

I guess it depends on school, instructors and students?

• Many students don’t want to pay landing fees elsewhere (homebase included in package) or stay overnight
• Many instructors don’t want to fly elsewhere or risk a stay overnight
• Many schools have their aircraft booked back-to-back

With the exception of Bizjet or Turboprop IRI breed, the majority of local or airliner instructors don’t do these flights…there are also some elements of risk-tolerances, I had one examiner who refused flying to Jersey, no water crossings in single engines (wet = DA42 only), another instructor does not fly in clouds while in uncontrolled airspace as he needs to lookout for traffic, another one never renewed his ELP…

Many schools can’t afford the costs of an aircraft going tech too far from home base. Let alone another country.

Not in the FTO context but in the PPL context we had this thread. It won’t work because 90% of people doing a PPL are not actually interested in going anywhere It would probably double the cost of the PPL.

And FTO customers also just want the piece of paper – the CPL/IR and the 13 exams. It’s called a “frozen ATPL” to make it feel better. They aren’t interested in flying the ILS at Le Touquet; 99% of them will never fly GA and have no real interest in flying GA planes or going to any places like that. It’s a chase for the “dream job”.

I would think flying further may be dictated by a shortage of IAP slots. For example here, we have Lydd EGMD. FTOs book the ILS for something like 1hr at a time. Most of them turn up late or not at all. So when I want a practice ILS and a go-around I just pitch up 20nm to the west, 10-11am, 3200ft, and call them up, and roughly 90% of the time I get it, and they get £20 for no work