Modular flight training
80 knots…” Johan calls.
“…Checked.” I reply. As the Boeing 737 thunders down the runway I have my whole body tensed, and I am struck by the fact that this is the real world flashing by outside the window. Up to now it’s been simulator graphics — they’re not very good anyway — but this is an actual aeroplane on an actual runway, and in next to no time I am going to launch said aeroplane up into the sky, where I hope I will have the presence of mind to remember all the myriad things I’m supposed to do to keep it there safely. Couldn’t tell you what those things are now — there’s too much overwhelming information battering it’s way into my brain. I’ll just have to trust that they’re lodged in my mind somewhere and that, when the appropriate time comes, I’ll remember them.
Now we are really shifting — God, the world is a blur outside — and before I know it Johan speaks again:
“V1…Rotate.”
Just like I’ve been taught (remember all those early sim sessions? Spending time after time honing our rotation technique, aiming for 3° of pitch per second and desperately trying to keep the tail of this stretched airliner from smacking into the runway?) I bring the control column back towards my tummy, and the aircraft obediently pitches up and powers itself into the blue September sky. After all this time — all the effort, the years of wanting, the heartache…the supreme highs, the depths of depression…after all the money — oh God, and how much money it took…after all of it…I am finally an airline pilot, flying a jet airliner. After everything that I and my family have been through…I’ve made it.
Nearly two years later, and with some 1,300 Boeing hours under my belt, my flight training feels like a golden time of striving to achieve something special, of every day having a purpose. Naturally there are retrospective rose-tinted spectacles involved, and now I find myself being asked questions on flight training by people who are contemplating taking the risk that I did, back at the end of 2007, and chasing their own dream of being paid to fly aeroplanes.
I met somebody recently who was asking specifically about the different training routes available. If you’re a civilian with minimal flying experience, there are two main training options for you to consider — Modular and Integrated. From a licensing point of view, they are identical; i.e. whichever you choose, the licence and qualifications you get at the end will be the same. But if you google flight schools, or go to any of the major professional aviation days each year, you will find your attention drawn to glossy brochures and young, good-looking people in white shirts with epaulettes standing in front of light aircraft. These are The Integrated. The big names of the flight training world dominate the marketing arena: CTC, CAE (Oxford Aviation Academy) and Flight Training Europe (Jerez) being the biggest of them all. Not a flying magazine in the country exists without a full-page picture of some recent school-leaver, looking confident and professional — maybe even behind some mirrored Aviators — standing in front of a Piper Warrior, clearly ready to make the step up and fly a big jet. Of course — the recession has hit everybody; and the pictures are of school-leavers because the big FTO’s (Flight Training Organisations) know perfectly well that their main target audience at the moment are the children of wealthy parents; who have weathered the storm and — perfectly reasonably — want their offspring to have a good career.
I won’t pretend that I am not a little cynical about this. Because when I was in my first year of University, desperate to make the dream come true, trying to decide whether to drop out of my only real chance of a career and chase something that was highly improbable of ever coming off, I got sucked in by it all. I barely considered Modular training. I mean — what is it? And that is a good question. Because if you are thinking of a career as a pilot of any sort, and you haven’t considered Modular Training, you could be making a huge mistake.
Let me take you back to 2008. I was about to turn nineteen. It was the 2nd February when my mum came to pick me up from university in Falmouth, Cornwall, just five months since she’d dropped me off for the first time. I was leaving behind my new home, new-found independence, new friends, new girlfriend, and going back to do…well, I didn’t know. I vividly remember sitting at the service station on the drive home, head in my hands, telling my wonderful mum that I was “wondering what the hell I’ve just done.”
Of course, there was something of a plan. I’d been crap at maths my whole life, so I thought about doing a maths A Level (because you need to be good at maths to be a pilot, right?) but in the end decided against it. I was planning to go to FTE Jerez, recommended by a BA captain I’d been introduced to. I would probably go for assessment within the next month, start training a couple of months later…
Some of you might remember the Lehman Brothers episode, which happened about this time. It kicked off the deepest depression for seventy years, which meant that any chance I had of getting a loan for flight training — especially considering that my parents owned no property to secure it against — evaporated before it even appeared. Things got worse when I phoned up FTE; I got an un-friendly response and was told coolly that there was no chance even for an assessment until October. So I tried the people who had been the most friendly — an Integrated school called the Pilot Training College of Ireland.
I got quite far down the line with PTC; at one point I actually paid a deposit for an integrated course. But despite their friendly helpfulness they had always skirted the answer to the question “So what is the total amount it will cost?” And the more I probed, the more the little extra costs kept popping up. Eventually, merely weeks before I was supposed to start, I took a second trip to Waterford in Ireland to make doubly sure of what I was doing. I forced an answer to the question, and what they said was “I think you should budget about a hundred and twenty thousand Euro.” Shell-shocked? I was.
By this time it was late August, and I was starting to panic. It was six months since I’d quit my degree, and I had nothing to show for it except a job selling outdoor sports kit. It paid badly and demolished my self-confidence; all my friends were off at university and getting on with their lives. However, desperate to be in the sky in some form, I had started sky-diving. Not many jumps, because I couldn’t afford to do it often; I’d just done a static-line course and a few early free-fall delays. But the jump-plane pilot had done his CPL at a place called Stapleford Flight Centre. It was he who first mentioned modular training.
In my Irish hotel room, on the phone to my financial advisor (Dad) I knew I wouldn’t be training at PTC. One look at Stapleford’s website and I could see the costs of training could be significantly reduced. It was time to change tactics.
So what is the difference between Modular and Integrated? Well, a modular course splits the different elements of a frozen ATPL — the licence you get at the end of it — into separate modules. You start with your Private Pilot’s Licence, then you build your hours up and take your theory exams. After that comes the Commercial Pilot’s Licence, following which you do your Multi-Engine rating, Instrument Rating, and Multi-Crew-Cooperation course. It offers the flexibility to train while you work, funding your way as you go, and paying for your course in smaller chunks. On an Integrated programme, everything is done as one course, full-time, usually living on-site and starting with the theory exams. That doesn’t mean you can’t do a modular course living on-site and flying full-time as well — in fact this is exactly what I did.
Of course for many people the biggest difference between Modular and Integrated training is the price. I would say that, at a rough assessment, you can take an integrated course and get the same licence for half the money by doing it the modular way. In addition, an Integrated course will not qualify you to go and hire a light aircraft, because you never actually do your PPL. And you fly less hours on an Integrated course, too.
So why doesn’t everyone know about modular training?
One answer is marketing. Aviation in Europe is suffering at the moment, and jobs for pilots are scarce. Jobs for inexperienced pilots are even harder to find, but the big FTO’s can afford to publicise themselves as the only place to train if you want to find work afterwards. And to be fair, they do have a good strike rate. In the good old days, airlines had partner programmes with some of these schools, agreeing to take x amount of students per year and part or fully funding those students’ training. These days however those schemes are few and far between; most of them have even morphed into agreements that get you into an airline, but leave you living on a pittance for the first year, and only after you’ve paid an additional large sum of money (i.e. tens of thousands — on top of your hundred-grand training costs) for a type rating. These ‘pay-to-work’ schemes are becoming more and more common, and anybody tempted by big promises from any flight school should bear that in mind.
When I went to visit Stapleford I took an old school-friend, Kate, with me. Our welcome was warm. The place was humming with activity: aeroplanes taxying; friendly people going about their private flying; students having a debrief over a coffee with their instructors. In addition, the school had no less than three advanced simulators for Instrument and MCC training, two brand-new glass-cockpit aircraft for instrument flight training, and a fleet of older steam-dial machines if you wanted to do it the retro way. In essence, they offered me a tailored product rather than an out-of-the-can, one-size-fits-all training course. The way the school addressed me as a prospective student and the instructors I spoke to were both extremely professional, but the atmosphere felt less formal than PTC. Kate summed it up: “It feels like the sort of place where if you put a lot into it, you’ll get a lot out of it. But nobody’s going to nanny you, so if you don’t apply yourself, you won’t do so well.” Wise words.
I decided this was where I wanted to be. I’d done my research; cold-calls to airlines had actually landed me up speaking to senior airline staff, and even a couple of Chief Pilots for advice. To a man (and they were all men) they said that provided the training was good, and completed within a reasonable time frame, Modular training was every bit as attractive to an airline as Integrated — and in some cases even more so.
Things were looking up. I was enrolled for my PPL course, and my family had saved the day financially. Between my grandparents, parents, brothers, aunt and uncle, they agreed that I would take early inheritance on behalf of my immediate family. On getting a job, I would pay them all back. Everyone took a gamble on me, and I will never forget it. My flight training would start in the new year.
Those months from January to June 2009 were, without a doubt, some of the best of my life. I loved my PPL training, loved my little room at the airfield, loved the people staying at the ‘New Accommodation’ as it was always called. It was a simplistic existence: two flights a day, five days a week, or maybe one flight and a back-seat on someone else’s lesson. Always good, that, because it was cheaper. The day I passed my PPL, my instructor immediately signed me off so I could go and orbit my parents’ house, triumphant. Then came hour-building…
Wake up, go flying, land somewhere distant, come back, have a beer with the guys, watch a film and plan the next day’s flying. Repeat. Can life get any better? And because I was a Modular student, I was in control of my own schedule. Nobody told me where to fly or what to do, so I made it up. I had the advice I’d received from the Chief Pilot of Aer Arran ringing in my ears: “Don’t just go and fly over your house for a hundred hours! Do something constructive.” So I did.
I took CPL and IR students flying with me. They liked the break it gave them, and in turn I used them to my advantage. I went to the CPL navigation destinations — small, hard-to-find grass-strips that tested your navigation skills, and I forced myself to fly to CPL-standards of height-keeping and heading deviation. I flew in weather that I would not have flown in solo, every time pushing my boundaries, increasing my experience, learning. I got myself lost. I made mistakes. But I learned from them, talked about them — worked out how not to repeat them. I learned how I operated at my best, and I flew countless circuits. I took myself off and flew glide approaches, I got my passengers to cut the engine on me to practice forced landings…they gave me diversions and I flew them at low-level, to make navigation harder. One of the many nuggets that my instructor passed on to me was the saying: “every licence you ever get is not a licence to fly, it’s a licence to learn.”
This is the benefit — but also sometimes the curse — of modular training. There is no other route into commercial aviation that offers you so much opportunity to take responsibility for yourself. Used wisely, modular training forces you to think and act on your own, making good decisions based on accumulated experience. In short — it improves Airmanship.
Hours now built up sufficiently, my ground exams were another opportunity in disguise. I chose distance-learning with Bristol Ground School, living back at my parents’ house, instead of a full-time taught course. Stapleford has associations with London Met, but I’d heard good things about BGS.
Don’t let me deceive you…the ATPL exams are nothing except a long, brutally hard slog; easily the hardest thing I have ever done, and it took me a whole year to get through them. That is partly because I had a job at the same time — I worked four days a week at a flying school. Here I learned a lot about what goes on in the background of an aviation business; I built up my customer service skills (useful to me now as CRM skills), learnt about maintenance requirements and procedures, and I even got the odd ferry flight out of it. It all went into the bag of experience. But crucially, the job gave me the money to join the Tiger Club.
The Tiger Club lives at Headcorn, in Kent. It was described to me once thus: “It’s the sort of place where if you had a prang, and you walked into the clubhouse and said ‘Sorry guys, I just came in a bit low and took my eye off the ball’ they would hang you out to dry. If, however, you came in and said ‘Sorry guys, I was flying my approach upside down, under some power-lines, on fire, and as I rolled upright I clipped the wingtip on the ground’ they would reply: ‘Well try the roll ten foot higher next time!’.” I exaggerate, of course. But not much!
‘Barnstorming’ is the word, shortly followed by ‘fun’. The club members are all lovely, extremely experienced in tailwheel, formation, display and aerobatic flying, and despite that tongue-in-cheek description, are actually very professional. That doesn’t stop the motto from being paraded on the wall of the club-house: ‘Fly Low, Talk to No-One.’ And it was here that they taught me ‘real’ flying. My first day at the club I got taken for aerobatics in a Tiger Moth. Then I learnt to do the aerobatics myself. And then they started to teach me formation flying.
The benefits of this type of flight training simply cannot be understated. How many loss-of-control accidents in commercial aviation could have been avoided if the pilots had received proper loss-of-control training? And by this I mean actually put the aeroplane in a situation where you are out of control. If you’re in an inverted dive, do you pull or push? The aerobatic pilots will know the answer immediately. If you are too slow, and you bring the stick back — what will happen? If the nose is so high that you are going to slide backwards, what do you do with the controls? The simple fact is that on an integrated training course you will probably fly aeroplanes that are so benign — for example the PA28 — that you will never feel The Fear. You may never develop that little voice that screams ‘No!’ when the nose is pitched too high, may never learn the little tell-tale signs of an impending stall, or the instinctive push forward on the stick at the sound of the stall-warning. You might not develop the crucial footwork associated with a wing-drop, or even the internal alarm bells that sound when the instruments somehow don’t match up. On these fundamental survival skills do passengers’ lives sometimes depend. But as much as anything else, the biggest advert for this training is becoming accustomed to using your brain calmly, when the world around you is spinning in impossible ways and your body is being subjected to forces you’ve never imagined.
In my mind, I find it preposterous that one would consider spending £100,000 on flight training that completely overlooks some of the most basic handling skills of all time. Imagine if you’d said, sixty years ago, that pilots in the future wouldn’t be trained in aerobatics — you’d have been laughed at! Of course it’s expensive to do, but on a modular course the costs are relatively so much less that you surely could find enough for a couple of hours of aero’s.
Today I find myself flying with people who have only ever flown three types of aeroplane: PA28, PA34 and B737. That’s not to say that none of those people are any good — indeed some of them are exceptional — but what some of them do lack is a willingness to think outside the company SOP box, and accept that there is more than one way to do something. They’ve always had somebody there telling them how to fly an aeroplane; they’ve never had the chance to work it out for themselves. Here’s an example: as pilots we are supposed to be able to cope with a high-altitude upset, and yet many company procedures state that you must not hand-fly the aeroplane at cruise altitude, where the handling is so sensitive that it requires another level of care and attention by the pilot. In the past it was taken for granted that people would have this experience (coming from instructing, or having experience on old aircraft without advanced autopilots) but we are slowly wheedling that experience out of the system, while simultaneously teaching people that it is wrong to practice flying their aeroplanes. If a pilot has had minimal basic training which has been very tightly controlled, and then moved to an airline where they are discouraged from learning to handle the jet, then how can that person be expected to cope with suddenly having to hand-fly that aircraft up at coffin corner, at night, in IMC, with a failed airspeed indicator and degraded flight-control logic, when they might not once have ever flown an aeroplane at that altitude?
My own barnstorming experiences were a huge benefit to me through the commercial aspects of the course. I know a lot of commercial schools boast about being based at ‘Controlled’ airfields, with commercial traffic. Personally, I think that is a load of nonsense. At these airfields your decision-making is taken away from you — if there’s going to be a conflict, you are told to orbit, or deviate, or fly a vector. If you’re in the circuit at Headcorn in something that does 120 knots, and there are parachutists floating down to one side, you’ve got the jump plane screaming down on an opposite circuit, a WW2 fighter could be thundering down the runway on a run-and-break, there’s a hot-air balloon about to launch and you’re catching a Tiger-Moth which is trundling along at 70 knots ahead of you on down-wind…then what are you going to do about it? Don’t expect any help from the ground, it is up to you to do what is safest. This is decision-making experience that could prove vital in your later career — you are learning the ability to ‘think outside the aircraft’ about everything that is going on, trying to assimilate as much information as possible, ask yourself whether anything is going to affect you, and if it is, decide what you are going to do about it.
Yet perhaps the most relevant reason for doing Modular training, in terms of the current jobs market, is the ability to say you are different. When I finished my MCC, I spent the best part of a year working on the ground for a charter airline. Much of it was tedious and menial, but it taught me a great deal about the industry I was going into. When I eventually came to have my first airline interview, I was asked the question: “Where do you want to be in five years’ time?”. I replied that I would like to have a command, and be working towards being a TRE. Their reply went something like:
“Jack. I sit here each week listening to everyone who sits in that chair tell me that in five years’ time they want to be a captain working towards a TRE position. Why should I hire you over any of them? What makes you different?”
I was able to turn around and list all the things I’d done: from setting my own goals to working my own way through the ATPL exams without help; having had two different jobs in aviation that gave me a wider background knowledge; to aerobatic and formation flying training, tailwheel experience, gliding…I could tell them that I was not just another hundred-and-fifty-hour cadet, Oxford Graduate Number 52981. I can’t say to you with 100% certainty whether this swung it for me, but I got the job.
The problem is that what makes Modular training so good also brings a down-side. An integrated student is so closely monitored and regulated that they are quantifiable to an airline. An integrated student is a thing, but a modular student is always an individual. To me that’s brilliant, but for many airline HR departments, all they seem to want is a stamp that says ‘approved’, to know that the cadet has enough money to pay up for the type rating, and that they are desperate for a job. I can only put my finger on three or four people I trained with who have not found a flying job, of some kind. Some are instructing, some bush-flying, many are in the airlines. But from asking my integrated-trained friends about their own course-mates, it does seem that the vast majority have got into an airline for their first job (although many of them are on appallingly bad contracts, and there are still the few who have failed to find work completely).
So, if you are thinking of making that big gamble and chasing your dreams of flight, have a serious think about how you want to do it. I won’t tell you it’s easy, or that you’ll definitely find a job at the end of it. In fact what I will guarantee is that the process is extremely difficult, time-consuming and stratospherically expensive. But it is also brilliant. If you’ve done a trial lesson in a light aircraft, you will know for certain whether your love of flying is enough to get you through the training; enough to take the risk. And if it is, ask yourself whether the lure of the big integrated schools is enough to part you from £100,000 plus. Ask yourself whether you want to be able to look back at your achievement, and know that you did it all yourself.
Jack Newman is the Commercial Editor with Get Into Flying
