Having read back over my posts it seems that the last time I wrote, at the end of 2008, I had a place on a CTC Wings course and was planning on flying out to New Zealand to begin my training in April 2009, subject to successfully passing my Class 1 medical with the CAA. I was also apparently half considering flying out to start my training earlier.

Well, I passed my medical but I didn’t go to New Zealand.

I spent many many weeks thinking about whether or not it was a good time to begin an integrated pilot training course. It kept me awake, I debated it with everyone who would listen, I had moments of elation when I decided that I would ‘definitely’ go through with it and I had moments of depression when I decided that I ‘definitely’ couldn’t possibly justify gambling in excess of £75,000 on a dream that may or may not come true, especially with the airline industry and economy in general being in such turmoil. In the end I decided on the latter. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.

Because I wanted to defer my place (in case the economic situation and the prospects of employment improved) I didn’t want to burn my bridges with CTC. To this end, I arranged a meeting with the head of selection at CTC in Southampton. The meeting was brief but fruitful – she allowed me to defer my place and explained that I wouldn’t need to go through the selection process again should I decide to take up their offer in the future, but that they would need to interview me again to ‘probe my enthusiasm’.

After the meeting, I had lunch with some current cadets and discussed my situation with them. Their overwhelming opinion was that I’d made the right decision – though I should note that they all spoke very highly of the quality of training they’d received, and two who had also studied at Oxford Aviation Academy and Flight Training Europe told me that, were they to have their time again, they would do all their training with CTC.

It’s been over a year since I made the decision not to pursue my training with CTC and I have to say I’m very, VERY relieved that I’m still in the UK, debt-free, and in gainful employment as a paramedic. I still feel passionate about flying, it’s still a job that I would love to do, and I still wouldn’t rule out pursing a career in aviation in a few years time. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that regretted not giving it a go – and that part of me’s particularly evident at 3am on a Saturday morning when I’m clearing vomit out of the back of my ambulance – but it’s a part of me that’s led by my heart rather than any rational thought.

The airline industry today really is in dire straights. Have a read of PPRuNe – it’s all there in black in white. Below is what I’ve surmised from occasional visits to the forum over the past year, though I can’t guarantee it’s 100% accurate and it’s certainly not an exhaustive list of everything that’s wrong.

• CTC Wings cadets are coming out of training into a rapidly growing hold-pool. EasyJet have taken a very small number of cadets on as first officers on FlexiCrew contracts (i.e. sixth-month contracts on very little pay) but other than that there has been NO recruitment for about a year by any of CTC’s partner airlines. No other airlines have taken on CTC cadets because of their lack of experience – and this includes those who had done their 6 months at EasyJet.
• Many airlines have gone out of business. Experienced pilots are unable to find flying jobs. Those in the know still predict many more airlines will go out of business, even as the economic situation improves.
• CTC cadets are having to declare themselves bankrupt as they are unable to service their debt. Remember – these are people who were ‘fortunate’ enough to be given unsecured loans two years ago. Unsecured loans for pilot training are a thing of the past so in future people may well have their homes or their parents homes repossessed.
• Type ratings are no longer being paid for by CTC. This was not something they ever guaranteed, but it was something which many people benefited from and something which set them apart from their competitors. This means current and future cadets may well have to budget an extra £35,000 to pay for their own rating after the Wings course ends.
• ‘Pay-to-fly’ schemes are on the increase. These are where type-rated pilots with very low hours can pay for line-training or hours-building. It means that airlines are getting substantial revenue from desperate newly-qualified pilots. It means passengers are being flown by people who are paying to work.
• PPRuNe old-timers believe that terms and conditions will never be the same again. In an economic environment where experienced and newly-qualified pilots alike are desperate for any kind of employment, and in which the future of low-cost flying seems to be in doubt, this is not hard to believe.

Yes, I’m glad not to be a part of it for the time being.

The rest of my life

So what else am I doing? Well, I’m bumbling along relatively happily in my current job at the moment. I have a permanent crewmate now, which really makes a big difference. We get along well. We’re starting to finish each other’s sentences. And sometimes, on nights, she brings in a hot dinner for us to reheat at hospital. What more could I ask!

It’s still not a job I want to do forever, but I don’t really know what I do want to do. I’m looking at other options. I’m spending a lot of time looking at job sites. I’ve even applied for a graduate scheme. We shall see.

Outside of work, there’s not a great deal of news. I’ve packed in smoking, but seeing as you didn’t know I smoked you probably won’t be all that impressed by that…. but who cares, I’m impressed with myself! Day 18 and all is well so far. I’m still living with my parents, but I’m looking into buying somewhere with a friend – an exciting but also nerve-wracking thought, particularly as I may be faced with a pay-drop if I decide upon a new career.

Still, when you’ve been contemplating £75,000 of debt for such a long time, a pay-drop doesn’t seem like so much of an issue…

The event was actually really useful – bigger than the Dublin one I went to last month, and with far more seminars and briefings. I bumped into one of the girls from my phase 2/3 selection day as I was picking up my tickets and had a chat with her about her plans later in the day which was nice – she didn’t seem overly worried about the financial crisis and it’s impact on employment prospects, and her dad’s in the airline business. Good news.

It was quite nice to be able to wander around the show knowing that I was a darn sight better off than the majority of the attendees, having already got a place on the CTC Wings scheme, and without needing to ask a single question of a single FTO. I had a chat with a recently graduated cadet from Cabair about how his job-seeking was going, and he told me that he was trying to feel optimistic to avoid hanging himself. Not a cheery chap, but understandably so. It’ll all be very very different when I finish of course….. 

The talk on ‘Is now a good time to start training?’ was delivered by the boss of Oxford Aviation Academy. Can you guess what his answer was? That’s right. But he did give a reasonably good explanation as to why that was his belief, and also conceded that ‘no-one knows’ when things will pick up. What he said was that the far-eastern and Indian market for pilots are absolutely booming, and the more flexible graduates from any training programme are, the more likely they are to find a job. He also said that closer to home he believes that airlines will begin recruiting again in roughly two years time. Historically, he continued, airlines have been dreadful at planning their recruitment needs. He mentioned BA telling him that they would not be recruiting for the next six months after 9/11, and then a couple of days later asking him to recommend four of his students to begin flying with BA ‘next Tuesday’. This failure to plan ahead, he believes, will mean that airlines will soon have a huuuuuge need for new pilots to make up for the total freeze on recruitment which is happening at the moment. I took what he was saying with pinch of salt, because after all he’s there to make money, but I did feel that whether or not what he was saying was a likely possibility, he genuinely believed it himself and was not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. But who knows, maybe he’s just a very accomplished salesman.

Other than that, I went to talks by NetJets (I still really want to work for them one day, although I’ll have to get 1500 hours under my belt first), Airbus (on ‘flying the modern flight-deck’), a CAA medical examiner, GAPAN (on passing airline interviews and tests), British Airways and a couple of others. All were very interesting, and the majority were quite impartial!

I have today booked my medical with the CAA at Gatwick. This has lightened my wallet to the tune of £317, and I shall be going down there on the 17th November.

Exciting happenings that are coming up:

• On Saturday 1st November, I’m going to the FLYER Professional Flight Training show, near Heathrow
• On Tuesday 4th November, I’m having a flying lesson at Stapleford – just to make reeeeeaaally sure I love it enough to take the risk with the money
• From Wednesday 5th to Thursday 6th November I’m going to Madrid. Ryanair were doing flights for £10 each way including taxes & charges, so I thought I’d treat myself during my period of eight days off work (which I feel is richly deserved, as I will have worked 120 hours over two weeks by that point, 36 of which will have been nights!)

So it’s all good!

This has given me a lot of food for thought and has worried me slightly. What if the reason people have dropped out is not that they haven’t been able to secure loans, but that they’ve decided it’s a really bad idea to start spending vast sums of borrowed money on pilot training with the economy, and in particular the airline industry, in such bad shape? What if they’ve decided that the numerous posters on pprune who reckon that there won’t be any flying jobs about for the next four or more years are right? And if it is just that they haven’t been able to secure loans, what if this is effecting so many people that CTC themselves will struggle financially and go bust halfway through my training, taking with them all the money I’ll have spent by that point?

These are not new worries – particularly the one about not getting a job at the end of it – but I suppose I’d pushed them to one side, having convinced myself that there’s no way of knowing what’ll happen to airline recruitment in two years time when I finish and that CTC is a large enough company, with a diverse enough range of business, not to be on the brink of collapse even if the number of cadets they’re training halves. But now I suppose they’ve come back to the forefront.

However, they’re certainly not big enough worries to deter me. I’m 24 now and have dreamt of becoming a pilot for far too long to let this opportunity pass. The older I get, the less employable I’m going to be anyway. Yes, I may have to wait some time after finishing the course to get a job. Yes, I will have to keep my ratings/licenses current during this period. And yes, I won’t be as employable after a few years of ‘hour-building’ as someone who has come straight off a course. BUT I’m fortunate in that I’ve got a back-up career to tide me over, and I truly believe that if I work hard enough at it, I will one day get a job with an airline. And there’s still that chance that like the 100% of CTC cadets before me, I may be lucky enough to walk straight into a job – after all, the word on the street is that the recession will end in 2009, and the economy will grow by 1% in 2010, and CTC did manage to place all their cadets in the aftermath of 9/11…… (head in the sand? me?….)

Anyway, I told the CTC person who rang me that I’d think about it and get back to her tomorrow. I still haven’t totally made up my mind what to do, but I think that I’m going to be guided by a couple of posts on pprune which said you should aim to finish around September/October time as this is when airline recruitment is at its highest. Bearing in mind it’s an 18 month course, this would make starting in April the most sensible option on the face of it, but considering there are often delays along the way I might go for the end of Feb/beginning of March to be on the safe side, and because I’m itching to get started!! Certainly anything earlier than that will be too soon, loathe as I am to say it, because I just haven’t saved enough money yet or sorted out what I can do to keep my paramedic skills current (and therefore keep my back-up plan viable) during my two years away from the profession. I’m hoping to be able to do a few shifts half way through the New Zealand bit of the course when I come back to the UK for leave.

I will keep you updated. Your thoughts on the matter, informed or not, would be appreciated!

I had a really restless night last night, waking up at least twice for at least an hour a time, and really struggled to get up when my alarm went of at 5:20. On the way to work I felt probably about as nervous as I had done on the day of my simulator test. I checked my email when I arrived on station at 6:40, just in case the recruitment people had decided to go in a bit early!

My crewmate arrived just before 7 and I warned him about what was to come shortly after 9. I was driving first today, and we got our first job at about 7:20. I don’t remember what it was. Anyway, we got to hospital about an hour after that, I checked my emails and still no news (obviously). By this point the waiting was driving me insane, and I was keen to do another job because the chances were that the next job would take about another hour and then I would be able to find out, whereas if such a job wasn’t forthcoming straight away I could be waiting much longer

The next job came – it was a rather nice chap who had been vomiting blood. We got him onto the ambulance, did the usual checks, raised his legs, and popped him up the hospital. There was another crew there who were eager to know how I’d got on, so I had to explain the situation to them and they wished me the best of luck. Then, after we’d waited an averagely long time to hand over, we wheeled the trolley-bed over to the waiting cubical, and were about to transfer the patient. Then the phone rang. It was 9:25. 

This caught me totally by surprise. I was ready for an email but not a phone-call, yet I couldn’t think who else it could be. Although I was tempted to answer it in the middle of the A&E department in front of the patient still on our trolley-bed, professionalism overcame this temptation. Well, professionalism and a very real worry of reacting badly if it was bad news!! So, I let it ring and my phone beeped shortly afterwards to tell me I’d received a voicemail.

We transferred the patient to the hospital bed. Then, as is the duty of a driver, I put a new sheet on our trolley-bed, folded the blanket neatly, wheeled it out to the ambulance and tidied the back. I thought it best to do all this before listening to the message, so I could go and sit quietly in a corner straight afterwards if needed. Sooo, I listened to the message. It was (of course) from CTC – the woman who’d interviewed me to be precise. She asked me to call her back to discuss my assessment result. This worried me – surely if it was good news, she’d have just told me in the message, no?

So I shut myself in the back of the ambulance and called the number. I couldn’t speak to the woman who’d left the message, so her colleague who answered the phone told me. I’d passed! I was (subject to references, medical, CRB check & visa of course), on the programme.

Apparently I’m likely to be going out in April. Although this is later than the February start I’d been told to expect, I think this is a good thing, because it means my initial 18 months training will come to an end in October/November time, which is apparently a good time for airline recruitment. However, it does seem a very long way off and now I’m in I really want to get started ASAP! That is of course the over-excited, petulant child viewpoint rather than the reasoned, mature adult one, but I quite like that that aspect of my personality still makes itself heard from time to time.

Anyway, I was physically shaking while I was on the phone and for a short while afterwards. I got congratulations from my crewmate and the other crew, rang my parents, sent texts to the friends who’d asked me to let them know, and spent pretty much the rest of the day between jobs reading congratulatory messages and answering people who wanted to know more about the next steps. It really made me feel very privileged to know that so many people were genuinely happy for me, so if I ever actually give the URL of this blog out to any of you or you chance upon it in the future, thank you very much!

Anyway, you may have got the impression from this post that I am absolutely over the moon. Well, that impression doesn’t even come close to what I’m feeling right now!!

It’s not the greatest or most thrilling piece of prose you’ll ever read, but then if it was I’d probably charge you to read it! Swings and roundabouts I suppose….

“Step 4

Time to take the ultimate test and prove yourself in a flight simulator. At this stage we will see how you perform in a jet simulator to confirm your capacity to learn and take on new information, as well as testing your co-ordination, dexterity and interaction in the flight deck.”

Well it certainly was the ultimate test – it was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. The most frustrating part is that I’m not going to find out whether I got through or not until Monday morning now, contrary to what the woman who rang me on Thursday said, and I really don’t have much of an idea of how well I did.

I got to the Nursling centre at about 11:00, having left at 9 to give myself twice as much time as I thought it would take to get there just in case. Having found it, I went for a bit of a drive, found a KFC for lunch, put my tie on, and then went and parked down the road and listened to the radio for half an hour, trying but failing to relax!

When I went in at 12:40, the other two people who were there for their Phase 4s were already sat in the canteen, and I was shown through by the receptionist to join them. We had a bit idle chat about what we all did etc, and I found out that for one of the guys this was his second attempt at this phase, having failed his first try eight months ago. This didn’t do much for my confidence, but at least he was kind enough to give us a bit of info on what to expect. The man who was to be assessing us came and introduced himself at 13:00 – he seemed very friendly and was keen to put us at ease. We worked out a running order between us (I was to go first), and then the scary bit began!

The four of us went to a briefing room for 45 minutes, where the assessor asked us to give the usual ’2 minute spiel’ about who we were and what flying experience we had, before going through the basics of operating a Boeing 737. I was already familiar with the layout of the gauges on the main panel and the basics of flying the aircraft because of MS Flight Simulator, but that proved to be about the limit of its usefulness! We were given a few figures to memorize which we were then asked to recall during the flight itself.

So, briefing complete, I went first with the assessor to the simulator. It was really quite awe-inspiring because, save for the slightly faded projection, it really was as if you were sitting in a 737 flight deck. I write about this as if I was surprised, which of course I wasn’t – I wasn’t expecting an office chair and a couple of monitors – but it was still quite breathtaking seeing it for the first time! The assessor programmed a few bits of data into the computers which ran the thing (zero fuel weight, fuel quantities etc), set us up for a departure from London Gatwick on runway 26, clicked a button which started the engines automatically, and then we took our seats (I was on the left!) and the fun began!

The assessor did the takeoff, and then handed the controls over to me during the climb. The first thing that surprised me was just how physically demanding flying a plane like this can be – and how quickly the forces change with different power, pitch, and bank settings. The key to making it easier to fly is to use the pitch trim constantly, but being able to do this rather relies on you being able to select the correct pitch in the first place! I got better at this as the simulation progressed, but certainly to start with my arms got a fair old workout!

Once we’d reached a certain altitude, I levelled the plane off and then we practiced a few turns at various bank angles, while trying to keep the pitch and power constant in order not to lose or gain altitude. This required HUGE amounts of concentration, and constant scanning of the instruments. I didn’t expect it to be easy, but I really thought all of my flight simulator experience would have helped more than it did. I suppose the reality is that I do very little manual flying on it, and when i do I’m never worried about being as precise as I was expected to be yesterday.

Anyway, things did gradually get easier and I almost began to relax into it a bit at one point. We carried on by doing some descents, and descending turns, which obviously required even more concentration! In the end he let me do a landing back at Gatwick, although we a bit late capturing the ILS and it was touch and go until he “helped”!

Did I pass? I just don’t know! I was a bit rubbish to start with (obviously), I did improve as the 45 minutes or so went on (also obviously – I think everyone would), and I did have a chat with him while flying without losing concentration on what I was doing. But that said, I forgot one of the three simple figures that he gave us to remember in the briefing, and that’s got to be a bad thing. I just want to know nooooooow!!

I’ll be rocking up to the CTC training centre at 12:45 for a 13:00 start. The first bit will be an hour’s briefing, during which it’s apparently advisable to take copious notes, and the second bit will be an hour in a Boeing 737-400 simulator. There are three people going to this particular ‘Stage 4′ day, so I may potentially have to wait two hours between the briefing and my turn in the sim, but the exact order is to be sorted out between ourselves on the day. I don’t know where I’d like to be in the order – not last I don’t think (too long for nerves to get the better of me), but it’s a toss-up between first and second. If I go first then everything the training captain has said in the briefing will be fresh in my mind, but if I go second I’ll have an hour to read the notes I’ve made and really take it all in. Oh well, I’ll just have to take it as it comes I suppose.

As I understand it, the simulator I’ll be flying is a full-motion B737-400 sim with the motion turned off. This is the type of machine that they actually use to train pilots how to fly the aircraft. In other words, they walk out of this one day and the next they’re flying the real thing. So I should imagine it’ll be pretty realistic! How exciting!!

On the down side, I think failing at this stage would be more gutting than having failed at Phase 1, 2 or 3 (aka the application form, the testing, and the interview) because I’m now so close that I can almost smell New Zealand. Or I would almost be able to if I could imagine what it smells like – quite sheepy I’d imagine. But you get my point.

Well tomorrow will mostly be spent playing Microsoft Flight Simulator so I can get used to what a B737 flight deck looks like again, if not really what it feels like to fly (although the geekier side of me is as excited about Friday because I’ll be able to see how realistic what I’ve been doing these past several years is as it is because it’s taking me one step closer to doing it for real!) but I shall try and update the background section as well if I get the chance, because it really would help you to make some sense of rambling posts like this one.

And I might do a post about the past few days at work, but they’ve not been terribly exciting, so i might not bother. Suffice to say I’ve just got back from my last of three 15:00-01:00 shifts, it was fairly quiet, and I’m reasonably tired. Goodnight!