It would be an understatement to say that I really want to get into an ab initio airline pilot training program at the moment - the “from zero hours to first officer” type of program. It’s becoming a fixation. I’ve long wanted to be an airline pilot, and this looks like my only practical option - and since I’m nearing age 30, maybe my last realistic shot at making it happen.
I’m looking at a couple of foreign airlines at the moment that do offer ab initio pilot training. I think few, if any, American carriers offer these programs. I’m expecting fierce competition, arduous test standards, and a very low acceptance rate. It must be like trying to gain admission to an elite university. Can anyone provide comment on such programs?
I suggest you peruse the pprune.org Forums. I will warn you though, that you probably will not be encouraged by what you learn.
Many years ago, Northwest had an ab initio program at University of North Dakota. Not sure they still have it. From someone I know who was in the program about 20-some years ago, you would emerge from the program with a job, but that job was most likely being second officer (co-pilot) on small planes and flying small routes. Someone has to fly that snowdrift-jumper from Grand Forks to Minot…
British Airways has an ab initio program that they call the Future Pilot Programme. Applications for the 2015 class closed about two months ago. I’d guess that they will do the program, er programme, again at the beginning of next year. There does seem to be a significant hurdle to entry, and that’s an 84,000 pound (nearly $129,000) bond to cover their investment in you. If you ultimately join BA as a first officer, you get the money back in monthly installments over seven years.
Lufthansa and KLM have a similar program. For this one, you may start out in Arizona, training in little old Beechcraft Bonanzas. If you prove not to be a complete fool, you’d then be sent overseas. If you can read German, their site is here. No idea if they have a bond requirement or if you sign your soul to them for 15 years.
Thanks - is this typical of ab-initio programs? Requiring trainees to defray the education cost?
With Lufthansa, according to this (English, pdf):
“The training costs are completely pre-financed by Lufthansa. You need only
cover your living and lodging costs in Bremen.
If you receive a contract upon completing your training, you will then
contribute to your qualification costs: your individual stake is 70,000.- Euros
which you will pay off at a monthly rate beginning from 300.- Euros.”
Which, of course, provides an incentive to both the pilot and to Lufthansa to make sure he comes to work everyday, even if he is feeling a little depressed.
Thanks.
If it’s a deposit to be paid by garnishing my wages, sure.
If I have to put down, say, $50,000 at the beginning - well, I can’t do that. Just not able to.
I hate to say this, but…
You’ll have a lot more fun being a private pilot. I’m an airline pilot at a regional, and I kind of wish I had stayed in Cessnas and Pipers and just enjoyed flying. I understand the draw, wanting to learn and challenge yourself. But the lifestyle really stinks, the pay isn’t good for a long while, and there is a lot of nonsense to put up with. Just having to deal with the TSA every day is enough to make one question career choices.
Remember Sully, of the Hudson River ditching? He spoke to Congress and really killed their buzz about the airline industry. Worth reading for anyone thinking about an airline career.
*ab initio *isn’t really the way it’s done in the US … yet.
For something like Lufthansa, understand that in effect you’re hired before starting school. It’s provisional hiring, since you have to graduate from the school to continue being employed.
As such, the winnowing out process happens very early. You don’t just apply to go to school on their dime then show up next month. You apply for the job, go through the multi-level interview process, then finally one in every few hundred candidates are selected to go to the school and some decent fraction (WAG 50-75%) of those graduate into the job.
The challenge in the US today is that you *can *buy flight training from organized airline academy type companies. It is spendy though.
But the real gap is this: you come out of there with a so-called “commercial” license and actual experience which is much less than is required by regulation for hiring into the right seat of an RJ. And there’s not much way to bridge that gap except years of intense crappy work at starvation wages.
Congress has created a problem where there’s a stepping stone process to get to the right seat of an RJ, but one of the steps is now so huge as to be unaffordable for almost all candidates.
How that gets “fixed” will be very interesting to watch.
Side item: I don’t get all the hate for TSA by crewmembers. I never have anything other than a smile for them, or they for me. They do a vastly better job keeping whackos and weapons of my aircraft than the minimum wage goofballs we used to have. And we certainly need something to keep bad-guys-dressed-as-pilots on the outside.
And with the advent of KCM I rarely get screened any more. Obviously that’s different for folks based at or laying over mostly at small stations.
I think you’ve pretty much got it nailed - insane competition, arduous testing, and hard to get into. Add in “very expensive” and you’re there.
Pilot training and aviation in general has some very severe problems. The industry seems to want 20 year olds with the expertise of Yeager or Hoover and 30,000 hours in the cockpit, which just isn’t going to happen. On top of that, they want these folks to work for starvation wages. It’s whack.
Personally, I’m happy I stuck with general aviation and small airplanes. There were all sorts of issues there, too, but at least I didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table and got to enjoy myself.
Does all this sound discouraging? Well… yes, it is. You shouldn’t go into aviation as a profession unless you are really strongly driven to it.
I actually think this is part of the problem. The industry knows there is no end of bright young (and not-so-young) individuals so bitten by the aviation bug that they will put up with crap like PFT, welfare wages, terrible hours, and other things that people in other industries never would. And so it continues. What’s the fix? Who knows.
I was under the impression that most airline ab initio programs either give you free or mostly-free training but require you to work for a lower salary after graduation, or require you to put down a giant financial deposit that you’ll lose if you don’t make it through. Is that correct? If “expensive” means the former, I can afford it, but I can’t afford the latter.
[QUOTE=Alley Dweller]
Which, of course, provides an incentive to both the pilot and to Lufthansa to make sure he comes to work everyday, even if he is feeling a little depressed.
[/QUOTE]
Probsbly a bit too soon to joke about that. 
It depends on the program, but the ones I’m familiar with you pay for yourself. And it’s not just expensive in outright terms, it can also be very expensive compared to a carefully researched self managed training program using your local flying school. This is the type of thing available to Australians: http://www.caeoaa.com/jetstar/fees-and-funding/#.VUSDfNOqpBc
I go back to a post in a previous thread. You need to ask yourself what you want out of this. Airline cadetships and university run zero to hero courses are a relatively quick way to get to be an FO, but is that what you want? I think if you ask most pilots who’ve flown in general aviation and the airlines what their best flying was, they will probably recall something from their GA days. I think generally speaking you can think of the progression of an aviation career in terms of two primary indicators, fun factor, and income. At the start of the career (assuming you work your way up through GA) the fun factor is high and the income is low, at the end of your career (assuming you get to be the captain of a shiny jet) the fun factor is low and the income is high. The lines describing fun and income are not straight, with the fun starting high and having a quick drop off initially and the income staying low for most of the career with a sharp spike at the end. This means that somewhere around the middle you have the regional operators where in some parts of the world, particularly the US, a lot of the fun factor is low AND the income is still low.
By doing some kind of integrated course you are attempting to skip the first half of your career which happens to include all of the fun stuff, and leap frog straight to the middle where the fun is low and the income is low. If you didn’t have a clear understanding of why you wanted to be there in the first place you can end up being a very bitterly disappointed pilot, even if, no especially if it has gone exactly as you planned it.
Don’t take this the wrong way, I’ve known guys who all they want is to fly people from A to B, they don’t care about poling an aeroplane around the sky, they just want to be some kind of bus driver, for them it makes perfect sense to go straight to an airline, because that’s what they want. You have to make sure it’s what you want*.
You also need to consider where you live. I gather you are in the US? Given that US airlines can’t hire an FO with fewer than 1500 hours (by law), you won’t find any zero to FO courses in the US because at the end of the course you will have perhaps 250 hours and aren’t employable as an FO. That leaves overseas courses. Do you have the right to live and work in Europe? If not then there’s not much point pursuing this type of course.
All is not lost though, the cadet type courses exist in Europe and other parts of the world because, unlike the US, they do not have a general aviation industry of any significance. The airlines have to employ a certain number of pilots from university courses because that is their only option. In the US you have a GA industry that will support a roots up type career.
My advice to you would be to make a start on getting a private licence. Do a minimum of a lesson per week and take it from there. Go steady, don’t give up. In the meantime you can look at other options. Your age is not an issue, I know a lot of pilots who made mid life career changes.
- Are you a flight simmer? If so do the following:
Plan a two hour flight in a sim aircraft with a decent autopilot, a B737 or something. Now sit yourself down in front of your computer and remove anything that you wouldn’t have access to in a real flight. Now take-off and engage the autopilot. Sit there for the next hour and a half staring at the screen. Don’t read anything, don’t alt-tab to browse the internet, don’t get up. Every 15 minutes or so or at each waypoint, take note of how much fuel you have and how much you will have at your destination. Is it enough? Good. Now back to staring at the monitor. About 200 miles from your destination you can start planning your approach. Get the destination weather, work out your approach speeds, put the STAR and approach in the FMS. Now back to staring at the monitor. At about 1000’ on the approach, disconnect the autopilot and hand fly the landing. Taxi to the gate.
A lot of that was boring wasn’t it?
Now imagine doing it four times a day sometimes next to someone you don’t particularly like or have anything in common with.
Now ask yourself, “is this what I really want?”
And if you haven’t already done it yet OP, please watch this short documentary on a typical day in the life of a US airline pilot. You too Richard P and Llama Ll.
I don’t mean to poop on the career or the OP’s hopes. I’m glad I did it. And my career has been less than mediocre compared to many others of my pre-airline background and era.
The flip side of a “checkered” piloting career is that I also have experience doing other kinds of jobs for many years while thinking of them as my career instead.
And overall I’ve had more happiness and arguably more success doing the airline thing than all the others. Though I’d certainly do a few things very differently back in the beginning if I had known then (even conceptually) much of what I know now.
The past is no guarantee of future performance as they say. *Office Space *is no way to live either.
I’m a Private Pilot SEL and R(H). Were I younger, I don’t think I’d mind flying regional jets or 737s. Private flying (when I can afford it!) is fun – especially in helicopters. I no longer want to fly a jet. It might be fun to fly the turboprops, but I’m too old to get into that. If I could fly a Cessna 206/207 size airplane for a Part 135 operation, that would be fun. Not a ‘bush pilot’, but one of these pilots who flies people to places faster than people can ride the ferries. Of course the pay sucks, and I’d need to earn the requisite ratings (which are expensive). But if I had the ratings, and had the GA industry not, for all intents and purposes, died, I’d like to own a flight school where I could teach people to fly airplanes and helicopters. I’d also like to fly ‘news helicopters’ or medivac.
But I don’t think I’d care for the airline pilot lifestyle.
I would have spent my years in Alaska. Bush flying is my favorite.
Marriage, kids all too early. I did manage to get in some wild & fun stuff but… Alaska & I would have gotten along smashingly…
[quote=“LSLGuy, post:14, topic:718919”]
And if you haven’t already done it yet OP, please watch this short documentary on a typical day in the life of a US airline pilot. You too Richard P and Llama Ll.
[/QUOTE]The “work work work work work work approaches work work work work fuel load work work” rings particularly true, and I’m just as guilty of it as the people I work with.
Me too.
All the people flying in airlines and saying they preferred flying when it was smaller, simpler, and more fun, they aren’t in a big hurry to actually go back to flying in GA. Obviously there’s something to keep them where they are. In the poorly paying airlines it’s probably the “promise” of a better job as long as they hang in there. In the better paying airlines, the fact is that although the lifestyle might not be the best and the actual work might be mundane at times, they’re getting paid enough that they can’t just up and leave. Then there are some who really like it. They like the job, it’s what they want. My partner is a bit like that, she does exactly the same job as me and it’s what she’s always wanted to do. I look back with fondness at flying taildraggers and biplanes and flying at low level and generally hooning around while that stuff doesn’t interest her at all. For myself, it’s that the lifestyle is actually really good. Not because I enjoy the airline lifestyle, but because the base I work from doesn’t have the typical airline lifestyle. I don’t work weekends for instance.
BTW, the main downside to sleeping with a flying colleague is that at home it’s all “work work work work annoying FOs work work work rosters work work work can’t get leave together work work work.”
Yeah Alaska would be good, not that I can work there, Canada would be good too, or back home in New Zealand. Maybe, one day, when I don’t need the money anymore.
One of my dream jobs would be to fly seaplanes in the Caribbean. I can vision either taking people to remote islands or awesome scuba / snorkeling spots.
(I suppose flying rich patron to their private island is a another possibility)
With the death of Chaulk’s the opportunity for MES flying has been greatly reduced and the maintenance / insurance is a killer.
Not a realistic thing, but that is why it is a DREAM job.
Brian
Yes, yes, yes… Too bad many people mess up the great things for no good reason.
Back in 1972, I got a ride in a Widgeon <sp> in the British virgins. Loved it.
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