Going into an aviation career, trying to find the best flight school for me. Finding surprisingly few resources to decide, I hope this post can be useful to others.
I’ve compiled a map of flight schools in Europe, green = offers ATPL+FI, blue = green but not suitable for me in particular (e.g. too hot for the dog), red = doesn’t offer ATPL+FI: https://www.mapcustomizer.com/map/matei-cpl
The data comes from https://www.bestaviation.net/flight_school/europe/ , which comes with some inaccuracies, e.g. it doesn’t show all bases, some ratings might be outdated/incorrect, and some flight schools might be missing or no longer active.
General questions applicable to anyone else looking for a school, but that’s been hard to get good answers for elsewhere:
1. what’s the post-CPL low hour job market like these days? I’d love to find an FI job or something I can pay rent with as soon as I’m done, but I haven’t been able to find much data/anecdotes on
2. is it hard to find an aviation job in a completely new location, after CPL? Some flight schools have said that I’m likely to get a job with them after completion, and sometimes that sounds true, but most of the time it seems like a marketing tactic.
3. any particularly trustworthy schools you’d recommend? Almost all instructors either recommend their own school (again, I think it’s usually marketing), or if I spend more time with them they don’t recommend their own school, but can’t recommend any other school either.
4. tips for financing? Is there a secret code I can give a flight school to get them to subsidize the training for me if I work for them?
5. is there a disadvantage in doing ATPL theory with a separate school, since most of it is online and general? Again, all flight schools want me to do it with them because it will bring them money, and tell me it’s a way to get to know their instructors and gives me a better chance at a job with them, but I can’t trust them. Prices vary by thousands of euros between schools.
6. any other considerations that are not often mentioned?
As for me specifically, here’s some context
7. 23yo male, EU citizen with car, software engineer (successful, but not for me for the long term, and market is unstable these days). I work remotely so not a big issue for location
8. hold a PPL(A) NVFR EFIS (76hrs total), trained in Bratislava (Slovakia) with DA20s (love them), DA40s, Viper SD4s, Cessna 172s
9. have a sickly husky. I should avoid areas with 26C+ max average daily temperatures. Need to have at least 2hrs a day to take care of him, so no airlines anytime soon. I like the idea of career FI, although I haven’t personally met many who have done it for a long time as their primary job and are happy people, so I’m a bit worried.
10. need a bit of social life. I’m not a party person, but I don’t look forward to settling in a small town.
Right now I’m traveling around europe checking out schools one by one. Just now I was in Czechia for 3 weeks, and what I’ve discovered is that the flight school I was interested in has a really good marketing team. Bratislava was great, but they’re not looking for FIs except in their Trencin base, which is not a great place to be as a foreigner that doesn’t speak the language. Heading to Budapest tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath as the contact didn’t answer any questions via email and managed to read drunk while sending me an application form.
Specific questions:
11. any tips for an aviation career with a dog? He wouldn’t be comfortable in the cockpit, and he sheds a lot so the aircraft owners wouldn’t be too happy, but maybe a place where I can leave him in the office with some company would be interesting. I hope an FI schedule is reasonable when having a dog.
12. any good flight schools specifically in the green dots on the map? The main metrics are prospects afterwards, costs, social aspects.
13. how could I reach more pilots whose opinions I can trust, to ask them questions like these?
Any other tips or relevant information welcome :) I’ve been lurking through EuroGA for a while now, and have always found it insightful and interesting, I hope I’ll get the same responses to my own post.
Bartolini in Poland could work, especially if you want to go in to an airline – they are in good terms with ryanair. I suppose they can also hire FI because there is surely a lot of turnaround there, and the Poland climate may fit your husky.
I can’t say much about the accuracy for other countries but for Croatia and Slovenia you totally missed the target. Instead of checking internet sites, you should simply google civil aviation agencies of European countries and find ATO lists, their approvals and contacts. That way you would avoid getting outdated info.
Emir wrote:
I can’t say much about the accuracy for other countries but for Croatia and Slovenia you totally missed the target.
If PPL training is included (which the thread title suggests) then for Sweden and most likely all of Scandinavia, the map is missing almost every flight school.
Instead of checking internet sites, you should simply google civil aviation agencies of European countries and find ATO lists, their approvals and contacts. That way you would avoid getting outdated info.
Indeed. And DTOs.
You may want to remove #281 from your list. “TTT Aviation” is a hoax by a well known and convicted criminal. Pops up every now and then.
You may want to remove #281 from your list. “TTT Aviation” is a hoax by a well known and convicted criminal. Pops up every now and then.
It’s amazing how people tend to trust internet crawler like the one in OP’s initial post rather then official sources…
thanks everyone, if you can point me to a better dataset I’d be happy to make a better map. It’s not a matter of trust, but convenience: official listings for every country are tedious to obtain (I can’t even find such a list for Slovakia), come in different formats, might not contain location/ratings, so making the map would have taken a lot longer. For an exploratory of what big cities have flight schools with certain certifications, I figured the website I mentioned would be ok, and once I find interesting options I can look at alternatives from there. You don’t need to trust this data, because there’s plenty more research to do afterwards anyway.
If anybody else would like to pile on about missing/bad data, please do it while providing alternate data sources containing ratings/locations.
This is not aimed at you ToniK, thanks for the clarification, I removed it from the map.
It’s not a matter of trust, but convenience
Conveniently obtained but incorrect data is useless.
I don’t have anything against your approach but I’m pointing out that it’s better to spend some more time in initial phase obtaining correct data (first of all contacts) and then later on save time by contacting only relevant and existing schools.
Here is such a list from Austrian authority:
https://www.austrocontrol.at/jart/prj3/ac/data/dokumente/DC_LFA_ACW_006_2024-01-29_1101591.pdf
If I find a few minutes I’ll elaborate more on your questions later.
