Journey to flight school-Sponsorship

Towards the end of 2008, for obvious reasons, sponsorships generally didn't exist. In a knee jerk reaction, many airlines pulled any near future prospect of student sponsorships.

Generally these programs will part-sponsor your flight training through an integrated flight training course, via an interest free loan. When you finish training, you pay back this loan by working for the company for about 3-5 years. Although you still have to fork out for the remainder of the course fees.

So, new to the idea of flight schooling? What the hell is integrated? Generally there are two ways to train to become a pilot, modular and integrated.

A ball park figure is that about 90% of pilots trained via the modular route. Generally, you get yourself a Private Pilots licence (PPL), then upgrade to a commercial licence (CPL) then get yourself an instruments rating (IR, in lamans terms flying from A to B then back to A using instruments only) Following that, you get yourself a MCC (sort of team working course) and a jet orienteering course (JOC). In addition to the practical side there are 14 CAA ATPL examinations to take, within 18 months, to pass. Like the name suggests, its modular. You control the rate of learning, and the amount of money to spend, and where you do the various bits of training

Integrated? Well all of the above via a CAA registered integrated school, within about 12-18 months. A lot more expensive but you do get dedicated training and sometimes airlines favour the integrated student over the modular.

So veering (or is it backing?) onto topic, sponsorship.

Towards the end of October, the airline Flybe, formally British European, offer £20k sponsorship for 4 lucky chaps via the Cabair flight school, although you had to fork out the remaining 43k or so towards the training costs. So, without further ado, I went for it.

So here we are, firmly in the 21st century, with fast(ish) internet access, websites, email etc. etc. so why did we have to fill out the application by hand? In fact all correspondence was via the good old fashioned Royal Mail, huh? I must admit, typing out all that I had to say over the many years has resulted in a deterioration of my handwriting skills, they were crap to begin with!!

So I still applied, making sure that I crossed all my t's and dotted i's. Next thing I know I get an invitation to go through the selection process.