I met a guy who leaves his job as an engineer to become an airline pilot.
He signed up for an integrated ATP course. I’ve been on his ATO website and this is the syllabus for the flying part :
Total time : 143h in the plane, 60 in the sim.
The cost is about 105 k€ (with the ATPL theory course).
I guess this programme has been approved by DGAC on the basis of its integrated structure, regular reviews etc…
But I still can’t believe the copilot of the A320 I/anyone take to go on vacation has :
- less than 150 h under his belt (almost half of my hours) 
- less than 20 hours solo (what experience do they have ? especially in decision making, which is critical)
- probably 5-10 hours by night
Is it the norm ? Do you have other examples of more/less complete courses ?
I digged into Embry riddle for comparison : students get out with about 200-250 hours if they don’t instruct (which is the way to go and improve I guess), for about 200 K$ (most former students seem very unpleased on forums )
Then they have to get to 1000 hours to be in the RHS of a regular airline (it’s 1500hrs for Part 61 students).
These days – yes, they might end up in the right hand seat flying you to your destination.
But getting is not the end of the “real” training – they will do a lot of “line flying under supervision”. They will start out with a second captain in the jump seat, who can monitor and verbally intervene if required, and if things go pear-shaped, can even take the seat, although that would be highly unusual.
After that phase, they will then fly with a training captain for quite some time, and even after that they will remain under supervision.
But they still can’t fly…..good at pressing buttons but if you disconnect the a/p on them more than 200ft above the threshold they wet themselves. There are exceptions….and if you dig a bit you find they were gliding instructors etc.
However, if you push them during line training, get them hand flying visual approaches etc(when permitted by increasingly restrictive sops…another story!) they end up ok.
To be honest the RHS is the only place for them. You can’t give them a C150 and tell them to fly 50 miles and take some photos of acwind turbine.
Yet they have a CPL and an appropriate rating – It’s a shocking state of affairs.
I think the current US system is better in that at least the pilots have more hours and have to instruct or do basic ME or SE commercial time etc to build them. That said, it won’t be able to provide enough pilots over then next 10 years.
Bathman wrote:
You can’t give them a C150 and tell them to fly 50 miles and take some photos of acwind turbine.
They’re not even allowed to be PIC in a C150!
Yet they have a CPL and an appropriate rating – It’s a shocking state of affairs.
Actually, they have a MPL (Multi Pilot License) and not a CPL.
I just found two evaluations of the MPL from the Lund University School of Aviation in Sweden. I have only read the introductions but judging from that they appear interesting.
The airlines do prefer the integrated route and a high time PPL background would probably be a hurdle to overcome in selection. The course is designed to feed into a reasonably serious Multi Crew Cooperation course (4-5 weeks, not a minimal 1 week effort), and for some cadets, a longer MCC phase where they accumulate 90-100 hours in a Boeing or CRJ simulator. In some cases the simulators are full motion and eligible to be logged as flight time. They then go onto type and line training as described by Cobalt.
In the US they can fly Part 135 before achieving an ATPL.
The students tend to adapt easier to the strict adherence to SOPs required by the airlines, trained from an early stage to the flow of a challenge and response MCC environment.
I underwent an integrated course in a flight school owned and operated by an airline. It was basically like this:
Radiotelephony license
1 month theory/practice
Internal exam
External exam
PPL phase
3 months theory/practice, solo between 10-20 hours.
Internal stage checks, internal exam
External exam
VFR experience phase
2 months
Course and planes relocated to foreign country.
We went in teams of two, decided, planned and executed all flights (40 hours) as PIC and 40 hours on the right seat. Destinations inlcluded multi day trips to Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, France, Italy, Spain, Greece…
Every 10 hours or so an internal check flight with an instructor.
Fuel/landing fees did not matter.
CPL/ATPL/IR theory phase
6 months
Classroom Monday – Saturday early to late
Selfstudy CBT after hours
Internal exams
External exam
IR theory continued + FNPT
3 months
Toughest phase on a analog frasca sim.
Internal exams
SE IR training (35 hours as student, 35 hours back seat) 3 months
Internal exams
ME IR training (35 hours as student, 35 hours back seat) 2 months
Internal exams
External exam
Theory refresher/ ATPL theory + internal/external exams
1 month
Followed by:
CRM, CRM and CRM again
MCC
TR Theory/Ground course 1 month
TR Flatpanel 2 weeks
TR SIM 5 weeks
Line training 4-6 months
First 8 or so sectors 2 or 3 days) with an experienced safety pilot/first officer on Jumpseat. The 8th sector was the incapacitation check – basically land safely alone and then the 3rd guy was history.
I had roughly 150 hours total on my first flight with paying passengers in the back. The learning curve is steep but generally one is not overwhelmed and certainly far from „useless“ in the plane. The training is directed to supply a functional first officer to a multi crew airline environment. The airline expects one to fulfill this role from day 1. No „I’m new so I didn’t call for a go around“.
The line training focuses a lot on many small details and applying all the theory to real world situations while familiarizing with the route network (I’d guess some 40-60 destinations back then).
After ca. 6 months
SIM training for CAT C airports.
CRM continued
I don’t think the european system is great and there are parts that I criticize heavily (especially the now common question bank clickeria and CBT only mode of training) but I’m not sure a pilot with 1500 hours in piston singles would be easier to get „on line“ in an Airliner.
Flying the plane is always the basis for everything but it’s actually only a very small part of the journey, it’s the prerequisite to be able to also do all the other stuff that’s going on. During all steps, especially during TR SIM and line training people are kicked out. It’s bitter but it happens, in many cases not for flying skills alone but in combination with other deficits. Of course, this is highly dependent on the outfit. Thinking: If I’d run self sponsored pay to fly deal I wouldn’t kick anybody out, the more time they need the more $$$ I can earn with them.
*I like the 1500 hour rule more because it created a bottleneck giving US pilots some great leverage to improve working conditions while I don’t think it really helps with training/experience/safety issues in airline flying.
Ideally, flight training should move away from a profit oriented system. A bit like the military, where costs/profits don’t play a major role but that’s another complicated subject.
I recall discussing the famous Cork crash (a turboprop twin doing a near zero-zero approach, on some “interesting, but still EU” AOC etc etc) with one IR examiner who had a pretty long career, and he said that while in the “modern” Europe there is always an experienced training captain in the LHS when these new pilots are on board, this is not always the case elsewhere in Europe, or especially elsewhere in the world.
Snoopy wrote:
Ideally, flight training should move away from a profit oriented system. A bit like the military, where costs/profits don’t play a major role but that’s another complicated subject.
In Sweden you can actually get a MPL “for free” as a university programme, including line training as an F/O with an airline. If you already have a PPL, you can also get ATPL theory “for free”.
(“For free” means that all training is free, but you have to pay for literature and also for the checkride and the theoretical exams.)
