Should You Start Pilot Training?

I'd like to firstly extend a warm welcome to both old and new fans of my IG account. Thank you all for continuing to feed me likes in order to keep my gram relevant. Let's jump straight into things then. This is something I feel is relevant to many of you who are mental enough to ask me for advice, and will answer many of your questions. You want to fly a plane, travel the world, smash loads of bitches, earn loads of money, I get it, I was once in your position, and so although my thoughts on this are going to be extremely opinionated, I feel that it does have some value as I have gone through all of the pain, reward, and now pain again.

To start with, you need a few foundations in place.

Money

A shit load of it, more than any normal person will have. Since I was one of those guys who was fucking mental enough to do an integrated course, here are the approximate costs:

• Assessment: £300
• Class 1 Medical £600
• Course: £90000
• Accomodation during training: £5000
• Type Rating at first job £21500 (at the € to £ exchange rate at the time)
• Plus living expenses and hotels during my type rating and line training, which was an extra few thousand.

You don't need to be a mathematician to see that it is a fucking arse widening amount of money. I was lucky for a couple of reasons: being able to save from a good job beforehand, and the market conditions when I finished (I'll come to that second point later)

Of course, there's the modular route which is now becoming more popular as this will drop the price of training. According to flightdeckfriend.com, the cost is between £40000 to £60000, and allows you to get all of the individual qualifications that make up an ATPL at your own pace. So you could even do your gigolo/escort work to keep money coming in along side your training.

Who the fuck has this money? I hear you ask, well not many people. You're talking enough money to buy a fucking castle anywhere north of the Midlands. But OK, you still want to fly a plane, so that you can post loads of selfies, and get more matches on Tinder.

You will need to be one of these types of people:

• Some cunt with rich parents - Anyone under the age of 23, who's sat in the right hand seat of a commerial airliner, will have fucking rich parents. I'm not digging at you, but it's the truth. You can't tell me or trick me with some bullshit story about how you worked in Sainsbury's or Next, and you somehow saved £100000. No, your parents need to be fucking rich mate if they're going to just willy nilly give you that kind of money at the age of 18. Unless you set up an online business which has made you a millionaire, but if that were the case, you wouldn't be coming into this job.
• Some cunt who saved from a previous career - I've met policemen, accountants, plumbers, underwriters, you name it. I fall into this category and had to be a tight cunt for years before I managed to save enough for a 50% deposit on a house, only to lose my mind and give that money to a flight school instead. If you're going to go integrated, then I reckon this is the best way to go. You'll have something to fall back on, especially given the current economic climate. And you will also have some valuable life experience, which is more important in a multicrew environment than years on vatsim or wanking under Heathrow's flight path.

There is also the option of securing a loan. BBVA used to do some shit with this, where you'd secure the loan against the value of your or your parent's property. I think this was withdrawn a few years back, but I can't be bothered to check, so you'll have to do your own homework on that. The sad fact is that you could be a proper smart cunt in school, possess the right kind of people skills, but you would never get into an integrated scheme, especially as these fuckers charge for an assessment. A few airlines were sponsoring, but as you can imagine, the selection process for these will be highly competitive for the right reasons. With the current economic climate, the chances of an airline sponsoring a newbie's training are about the same as Watford winning the Premier League.

Age

In terms of getting a job, I don't think that the date that your mother squeezed you out matters. I've met a range of guys starting out at ages ranging from early 20s to mid 40s. Back in the old days, companies used to want someone who would last at least enough time to get some use out of them, but thanks to good old equality in this part of the world, this is no longer the case. What you do have to consider is whether it's actually worth your while financially. Let's consider Pete, a 21 year old who's just completed his ATPLs. He has a raging hard on over the smell of JET A1, and has just landed his first FO job at a major low cost carrier. At the age of 23, he lands his second job at a major legacy carrier, he's sorted. His starting salary at the legacy carrier is £50000, with a 10% matched pension contribution from the company, rising to £100000 per annum after 13 years. He would still only be 36 years old. He can now do his command, and now his salary goes up again to £120000 per annum. He'll do this for another 24 years until he is 55, where he can now retire at said airline and he is fucking loaded. Let's compare him now to Michael, a 40 year old former plumber who's saved a fair bit, and now he's got enough to start his integrated couse. He completes his training at 42, and gets a job at a budget carrier. Here's where things will be different though, after two years of flying, he will have the hours to apply for a legacy carrier as Direct Entry First Officer. Most big airlines usually ask for the 1500-2000 hours mark with a full ATPL. Not a problem at all for Pete, but for Michael who has a wife, mortgage and two children to support, this might force him into asking himself if it is economically viable to make that jump to a place that takes 13 years to get to the highest pay scale.

This is not really a problem though if you want to fly and enjoy the job, as most budget airlines will allow you to climb the ranks and become a Captain after 3-4 years (if you can be fucked to do it) and that also means that the pay increases a lot faster in the industry than it used to, so it's a winner here. I would say though, if you are 45 then consider that you're about to spend the best part of £130000 including type rating and expenses (which is generous) You really need to consider whether you'll earn enough throughout what remains of your potential career, not only to repay debts, but to support your household and have enough to comfortably retire on.

The other thing to consider with your age, is your ability to learn. Yes I know I might sound agist, but a 40 year old cannot absorb information as quickly as a 21 year old can. You're about to embark on probably the most anus stretching workload ever with your ATPLs, then once you have the job, you have the type rating, then will continue to get fucked by checks that you will have to endure for the rest of your career. You also have to consider your health. If you are over 40, then the validity of your Class 1 is only 6 months, and let's face it, you won't end up with a figure like Cristiano Ronaldo in this job; shit working hours and shit food. It doesn't take a lot for someone to suddenly fail their medical and have their career come to a sudden halt. Add to this, the fact that you're more likely to have a family and a fuck load of bills. Have you fully considered the effect this will have on your wife, husband, kids and pets? One of the shittest things about this job is having to either relocate, be away from home for extended periods of time, and flying at times that owls go hunting. All fantastic of course, if you're a young spring fucking chicken, ready to whip your genitals out and get as many STDs as possible, but if you are 45 with a wife or husband who's always looking after the screaming little shits, it's fucking soul destroying if you're always away, and when you finally do come home, you're potentially too knackered to engage with any of your family.

Luck

In other words, the economic climate. I just call it luck though, because no one fucking knows when it'll suddenly decide to take a nosedive and fuck over everyone. I remember the day that I started, meeting guys that were coming back to the flight school to renew their IR, after having finished their training three years prior and still not successfully finding a job. It was pretty concerning, thinking about the fact that I'd just spent £90000 on the course, then potentially having to find another few thousand a year to keep my IR current. The hourly rate of a twin is more expensive than a high end escort, so it's no laughing matter. But by the time I'd completed my ME-IR Skills Test, one by one, every airline in existence began to recruit. This went on for years, and it got to the point where so long as you had all of your limbs and a Frozen-ATPL, you'd be at least guaranteed an assessment. And even at the assessment, there were enough jobs for everyone who showed up to the assessment that day.

Now think back to 2008 when things went to shit, thousands lost jobs, and thousands like some of you finishing flight school, ended up being thrown into an ocean of debt, competing with your colleagues and thousands of other pilots with experience for an ever decreasing number of available seats on the right. 'But I went to one of the best flight schools, got a 97% average on my ATPLs and First Time Passes for my CPL and IR Skills Test, surely I can at least get an interview?' The law of supply and demand doesn't give a shit.

Fast forward to 2020, the shittest time to ever be in the travel industry. Some people will be telling you "oh don't worry, if you have a dream, just go for it". By all means mate if you're a fucking millionaire, but how many of you guys have enough to spend £100000 and still be ok to wait it out for a few years after training? This also begs the question, is this job really available to everyone? Flight training is big business, and I think it's gotten so monetized, that it has become accessible mainly to people who have a shit load of wealth. I'm not saying for one second, that the people who go through flight training are thick, well, ok maybe some of them are. But to come out of flight training with high averages and first time passes requires a huge amount of sacrifice and dedication. The problem is that if you are less financially independant, and you end up finishing after 18 months with a £100000 debt secured against your or your parent's house, you are up shit creek without a paddle. And if you grew up in a council home and have nothing to offer to the bank in security, then you'd possibly never have the opportunity at this career. Although, in that situation you'd save yourself the headache that a lot of us are in now anyway.

"But the market will just bounce back like it always does". Perhaps it will, but lets just look at a bit of US economic data from Forbes to compare this will the last time something really shit happened:

• 800000 jobs were eliminated in March 2009 during the height of the Great Recession; about 8.6 million jobs were lost during that entire recession.
• More than 20 million jobs were eliminated in May 2020, and over 33 million jobs have been lost since the crisis began. Think about that.... That's over double what was lost in the entire period of the Great Recession in USA alone, and we're not even coming out of this crisis yet.
• During the Great Recession, the highest rate of unemployment was 10% in October 2009; the unemployment rate for April alone was 14.7%.

Of course there's a huge difference in that the Great Recession was caused by a bunch of greedy fuckers who gambled your money away, and the bollocks we've got now is due to someone eating a fucking bat. This is worse, and although these figures are for the USA, Europe will not be so different. UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has done an absolutely fantastic job to keep me earning money whilst I've been sat at home wanking for the past couple of months, but even he has admitted that there might not be a sudden bounce back in the UK economy. 2.1 million people here signed up for the dole in April this year, and the total cost of the UK furlough scheme on the 4th of the May was £8bn. No government has ever had to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.

With less jobs, there is less money to spend, and that means less travel. Businesses are already rethinking the need to move staff around, as group meeting apps like Zoom mean that people can just do business at home with their balls and flaps hanging out. And some businesses like Twitter are already allowing a lot of their staff to permanently work from home (lucky fuckers) Less people will go on holiday because who the fuck is going to have a few hundred quid spare if you've been either furloughed for a few months, or made redundant.

So think with your fucking head. Don't give me the whole "if you really want to do it, then go on and do it" bollocks. That may have been the case with SARS and the Great Depression, but this is a different ball game.

It comes down to this - me and my colleagues either saved the money by being tight arses for years, or were lucky enough to have the Bank of Mum and Dad. I'm not any smarter or hard working than you are, I just got lucky with the timing of the economy. Yes the industry will bounce back, but it won't look anything like it did before 2020.