The Wings Alliance aims are to provide graduates from member schools with a path into employment
Wings Alliance
The Wings Alliance is a trade association of EASA flight schools. Its aims are to provide graduates from member schools with a path into employment, to encourage best practice and the improvement of standards within the industry.
In promoting our graduates to employers we are up against large and well-funded integrated schools. We have a number of advantages. For prospective pilots the choice in the past has been to pay £100,000 ($130,000) or more for an integrated course which purports to give you an advantage when seeking your first job, or spend half or less doing modular training and find employment on your own. We offer the same employment opportunities at half the price of the integrated schools!
For employers, it has been easier to use large schools where the employer understands the training that the pilots have been given and has a sense of the usual graduation standard of the pilots, where the diverse nature of modular training can be difficult to comprehend. We overcome that problem in that all pilots we recommend to employers go through a standardised selection and final course, so employers can now access a source of pilots that may have overlooked before.
The Wings Alliance is developing a great reputation and we are now successfully placing students with partner airlines.
All the students who have completed our unique Wings Alliance Airline Pilot Certificate course have been referred to an airline for selection. All of those who have completed the airline selection have been offered a job on the flight deck.
Entry to the Wings Alliance Airline Pilot Certificate course is via selection. This day is conducted by a team of current airline trainers and specialist selection staff at their headquarters in Clevedon, Bristol. It determines an individual’s performance against criteria employers are looking for and it consists of a group exercise, individual interview and a planning exercise. Everyone attending the day is given individual feedback on how they performed and where applicable areas they need to focus on for improvement. Students can attend the Selection Day at any point through their training but a prerequisite the Airline Pilot Certificate course is a EASA CPL(A) with multi-engine IR and ATPL(A) theory credits (with the training conducted at Wings Alliance member schools), and the right to live and work in the EU.
Those who successfully pass the Selection Day will be invited to join the Airline Pilot Certificate (APC) course. You will be assessed throughout the course and successful graduation and placement with employers is dependent on an individual’s performance.
The APC course starts with 4-days Crew Resource Management and Technical classroom training and then ten 4-hour simulator sessions. The simulator training is assessed and forms the final stage of selection.
Next an individual will complete a 2-day advanced Pilot Core competencies course which builds up on the non-technical CRM training undertaken before the simulator phase and introduces further pilot competencies, not covered elsewhere.
This is followed by airline selection training before the candidates are invited by the employer for the employer’s selection. Finally, the graduates will be placed with an airline for type and line training.
The cost of the course, including all elements other than the type and line training is £7,500, there is a reduced version for experienced multi-crew pilots’.
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Background info
The Mentored Training Programme
This is a programme that is designed for pilots who have yet to start or complete their licence training. The service is free. This free programme will provide the students with the following benefits throughout their training:
- Careers advice
- Mentoring and support throughout training
- One complete training record
- A proven pathway to the flight deck
- Entry in the Wings Alliance Pilot Database
- Pilots may join the Wings Alliance Mentored Training Programme at any time before or during their training. The sooner they join the sooner they benefit from the support and guidance.
