It took a month, but Etihad replied to my application for their Cadet Pilot Sponsorship scheme. Its easy to understand why it took them so long, this is by far the best offer of sponsorship for cadet pilots out there at the moment so there are literally thousands of applicants for those 12 highly valued spaces!

Applicant are invited to send an email to Etihad stating which location they would like to attend for the selection tests. You can choose from London, Frankfurt, Johanesburg, New York, Sydney and of course Abu Dhabi, which is where Etihad is based.

So its fingers crossed, head back into my books for revision, and I wish every applicant the best of luck. Its important to remember that its not just your grades that make you a good pilot, a lot is about the kind of person you are.

ps. For those of you who already hold PPLs or CPLs, hands off! This is a sponsorship for ab-initio pilot onlys!

Today (15th Sep 08) sees the official Launch of “Fajja’s Flying Fund“. It may seem cliche, but for as long as I can remember I have wanted to become an airline pilot. I have worked hard at school and put myself through Univeristy studying Aeronautical Engineering, and now I find myself so close to reaching my goal!
There is however, one major stumbling block…the money! I have passed the CAA Class 1 medicals, I have passed the Aptitude tests, now the final step is raising enough money to enable me to pay for the course. The course with CTC flying school costs in excess of £60,000. At the moment I am nearly 8% of the way there, which is a great start, but I need something extra to build up my capital in addition to my day job. Which is why I decided to try this.

Basically when you buy a square of 100 pixels, you are buying a spot which you can upload your own picture (nothing naughty mind!) and have it link directly to your own website. Thus you are buying a square of advertising for a minimum of 5 years.

Anyone who buys an advertising square will in effect be buying a link to their site which will remain active for a minimum of five years. You can choose to upload your own image to the squares during the purchase process (nothing naughty mind!). Each square is made up from 100 pixels. You can choose to purchase 1 or more whole squares, remember the bigger your picture, the more noticeable it will be! The pricing of the page works out to just under what the total training fees will be. There are 10,000 squares, which will be sold at $12 each equating to a total of$120,000 once all the blocks are sold. This works out at roughly £61,000 which is what my prefered course with CTC costs.

The fee for each pixel is $0.12 which means that a single square containging 100 pixels can be purchased for $12. Factoring in that the site will be active for a MINIMUM of 5 years, that means you are paying $2.40 per annum for a link to your site. Thats pretty good since some sites, not even big sites, can charge around $40 per month!

Fingers Crossed, and thank you in advance for your support.
Glen aka “Fajja”

Well as you can see my flying fund isnt climbing very fast if at all! I have been trying different ways than the norm to earn extra money but it hasnt really taken off…yet!

Since I don’t have the vast amount of cash required i have been trawling the interweb for airlines who sponsor people with 0hrs flying time and take them right through to that Right Hand Seat. Out of 20 airlines i picked out my head 5 airlines have cadet schemes. The only downfall, for me anyway, is that they require you to be a full time resident in their country. The airlines I found are:

• Singapore Airlines (must be a singapore resident)
• Etihad
• Qantas (Australian Passport or permanent residency required)
• Virginblue.com.au (not 100% sure but think they do!)
• Lufthansa (site was in German so I might be wrong)
• Cathay ( must be permanent Hong Kong resident )

So there you go, i’ll add to this when I find more, hope it helps some people out.

Well it’s nearly time for me to head back to Bournemouth and try again to pass stage 3 of CTC’s selection procedure. In the past 18months I have taken in their feedback and tried as best as I could to answer each question they raised. Hopefully this time, I can prove I really do have what it takes! I have never been very good at “selling myself” in interviews.

From the feedback last time the main qualities which they highlighted that they were looking for are; leadership skills; self awareness; motivation; communication; responsibility; reliability; dynamism; team working; high standards; flexibility and and understanding of the Airline Industry.

In the past 18 months I have had a change of job, change of location, learned new things, pushed myself in my swimming, and at work I have tried to make the most of it, by learning about myself in a professional environment and improving where I can.

Wish me luck!