Page 24 - All About History - Issue 12-14

Education

Day in the life

COMMERCIAL AIRLINE

TRAINEE PILOT

HITTING THE BOOKS AND THE FLIGHT

SIMULATOR IN ORDER TO TAKE TO THE SKY,
WORLDWIDE, 21ST CENTURY

Mankind has long been fascinated with flight, as can be seen from
the works of scholars and thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci. The world
wars showed what a devastating weapon aviation could be, but
the golden years of aviation in the 1950s and 60s injected real
glamour and mystique into the job of being an airline pilot.
Read on to find out what modern-day trainee airline
pilots have to go through to ensure they are
educated enough to take flight…

EARLY START

Gaining all the required skills to be a commercial
airline pilot is a big job and aspiring pilots will
often have to rise early to get to class and ensure
they fit everything they need to do in the
day. In most of the company training
programmes cadets are put up at ‘digs’
where they live together as they train
in their dream to take to the skies.

HITTING THE BOOKS

There are different types of pilot Pilot training is long,
license, such as private, light aircraft and demanding and expensive
commercial license. Training to be a commercial
pilot isn’t cheap, costing around £75,000 ($125,000)
so the cadets have plenty of incentive to study hard
and pass. There is a series of exams, all of which
are multiple-choice, but these must all be passed in
order for the cadet to progress.

FLIGHT SIMULATOR

While having theoretical knowledge is very
important, how the pilots actually do when How do we know this?
they are in the air is the key. As they are not yet Much of the information from this article
qualified to handle big commercial planes, a flight comes from the trainee airline pilots
themselves and the personal blogs and
simulator is used. A qualified instructor or one of accounts they have written about the
the other trainees acts as co-pilot while the cadet intense training programmes they have
gains a realistic experience of the process of the gone through. Information is also available
take-off, flight and landing in a flight simulator. In through the websites of the aviation
companies themselves and the book The
later years, these have become incredibly accurate, Airline Training Pilot, which details the
emulating the experience of flight in detail. changes to training that have occurred.

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