I am currently a 25 yo fresh graduate from Economics in SMU, and I am planning to pursue a challenging and fruitful career as an airline pilot. Given my age, I doubt I can pursue flight training with the Singapore Youth Flying Club or Aeroviation, which are catered for 13-17yo students.
Based on research, I had found out that:
- It costs ≈$150,000 to train a person to become a commercial pilot (CPL + MEIR)
- SIA cadet pilot program has an acceptance rate of 1% (only 10 out of 1000 people interviewed get selected). I heard rumors that the interviewers are known to be strict and harsh.
- Cadet pilot programs may be biased to select people who had prior military experience as an Air Force pilot or Youth Flying Club (even though website requirements said that no experience is required). This means to get on par with them, need to spend at least $20,000 to get a private pilot’s license, be it locally or overseas
- Problem is, if I am selected, I may have to learn the PPL syllabus from scratch since it’s an ab initio cadet program. Wouldn’t this be wasting money?
- Most fully sponsored cadet pilot programs would be biased to select people of their own citizenship (e.g. Cathay Pacific would choose HK residents, Qatar airways would choose Qatar residents, etc). For SIA, the application is fully open for both local and international applicants so it is more competitive
- Medical wise (Class 1 medical) is not really an issue for myself.
I would like to ask for any advice how I can start pursuing this ambition economically. My family is poor and they can’t help much to finance the flight training. It’ll be good if you can provide any financing options (or if you know any flight school that allows you to work as a CFI after attaining CPL with them)
Singaporean schools are preferred (Seletar Flying college, Republic of Singapore Flying Club, etc)