Becoming a Pilot: A Guide to Being an
Airline Pilot

Becoming a Pilot: For many people, flying, and particularly the job of an airline pilot has
always had a certain degree of glamour and excitement attributed to it, you just need to
see the recent series of British Airways and Virgin Atlantic adverts for an example of that.
The opportunity to operate a state-of-art multi million pound machine seven miles up at
five hundred miles per hour with a few hundred people on board to far away shores is very
appealing, but for a significant number of people, it is career many aspire to but few
achieve.
Commitment
The road to becoming an airline pilot can be a long and arduous one. It requires total
commitment and often involves a degree of good fortune and a lot of patience and
persistence. The industry is notoriously cyclic and volatile being heavily influenced by a
vast array of external factors, with recent examples being the recession and the Icelandic
volcano ash crisis. In addition to this, the financial outlay required by prospective students
for today’s flight training is massive, often extending into six digit figures. These dynamic
variables make it a particularly difficult occupation to achieve success in and associates a
significant amount risk to your training investment. There are however a number of factors
which can be directly influenced by you to mitigate the risks as much as possible.
Understanding and utilising these factors to your advantage will give you the best chance
of achieving success.
At first, for someone who has just started looking into how to become an airline pilot, the
route to first officer can seem very complicated. Understanding which licences are
required to be eligible to apply for the position of a commercial pilot, and how to obtain
these is a perfect example of this. There seems like a maze of acronyms and
abbreviations to get your head round and knowing where look to find such information
isn’t always obvious. Then when you’ve got your head around which licences you need to
get, you then have to think about whether you should undertake integrated or modular
training and at which flight school. Questions such as “should I go to University or not?”
are very relevant, especially now given the recent increase in tuition fees, but again there
is little advise on such subjects available. Our free service at flightdeckfriend.com
addresses such questions and helps to provide a clear explanation on how to obtain the
appropriate licences.

The realities of day to day life as an airline pilot.
With the vast costs and risks involved in flight training today, it has never been so
important for any future pilot to understand what is involved in achieving their goal, the
risks involved and the day to day realities of the life of a modern day airline pilot. The
typical airline pilots job isn’t what it used to be like thirty years ago, in terms of what
the job actually involves, lifestyle and terms and conditions. That’s not to say it’s not
still a very privileged and rewarding job, but one must understand the current realities
of the industry and how the role of pilot has evolved over the last few decades.
As aircraft design has evolved, and technology developed, the role of pilot has
followed suit. The modern fly-by-wire aircraft are now highly automated, and as result,
the role of airline pilot has become much more comparable to that of a “systems
manager”. On a typical day operating in and out of busy airports, the autopilot will be
engaged at around 1000 feet after take-off, and disconnected about 500 feet before
landing. Whilst the pilots are still providing the inputs to navigate and fly the aircraft in-
between these points, the amount of manual handling has certainly decreased as
advances in aircraft design have progressed. There is of course a requirement to
maintain a competent degree of manual handling, and most airlines have procedures
in place to allow and even encourage this.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the significant responsibility held by the flight crew.
Hundreds of people put their lives in the hands of flight crew every time they fly, rightly
expecting the utmost professionalism. There are of course operating procedures in
force to help ensure the safe and efficient operation of the aircraft but the flight crew
are often required to make quick and critical decisions taking into account a vast range
of factors. For this reason the training is both demanding and intensive.
Deciding whether or not to start commercial pilot training, which training route you
should choose, and which airline you might aim to work for is very subjective to
individual circumstances. We recommend reading all the areas of the site to help you
make an informed decision.