Pay to Fly: Exposing the Dark Side of Hiring for Profit

Becoming and being a pilot can be extremely fulfilling. It has lots of different ways for self development, and a huge amount of day-to-day variety that keeps things interesting.

But it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It requires lots of sacrifices, and the industry definitely has multiple issues that really shouldn’t exist, yet somehow still do.

There’s one particularly corrosive issue that takes the crown by far: Pay to Fly 💰

What is Pay to Fly, and what are the effects of it on pilots, the industry, and flight safety? But most importantly: How can we improve the situation?

Let’s unpack all of this! ⤵️

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What is Pay to Fly?

Pay to Fly is the practice of pilots paying a substantial amount of money to gain flight experience or to secure a job.

Basically, a flight school graduate paying an aviation company money to be a pilot for them on a revenue-making flight. This can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars!

Despite the fact that pilots are a group of individuals who have often already spent over a hundred thousand to finish their basic training, this practice is still way too common.

For people who aren’t in the aviation industry, this probably sounds completely insane. That’s because it is!

Yet, this is still an unfortunate reality in many parts of the world, despite the ‘pilot shortage’ and ‘booming’ aviation stats that we are seeing now that COVID is behind us.

The problem is that the conversation is usually around whether or not this is illegal.

This is kind of irrelevant though!

Even if making pilots pay for this is completely legal, it’s still highly unethical and has lots of consequences that aren’t highlighted enough across the industry.

Airlines are still taking payment for interviews, type ratings, line training, and even add-ons such as crew resource management training, which is usually a requirement before employment is even considered.

We challenge you: Name 1 other industry that operates this way, where prices are also as astronomical as the aviation industry! An airline type rating can cost anything from $20,000 to $50,000!

The helicopter industry has it even worse, where most complex type ratings start around $70,000. Yep we agree, completely insane! So how did we even get here?

How did Pay to Fly Become a Reality?

Pay to Fly as a concept has emerged over many years for a variety of reasons. You usually hear pilots (rightfully) say that one of the main reasons is corporate greed, but the story is bigger than that. Let’s go over the main reasons why Pay to Fly exists.

Money, Margins, and Greed

Yep, it’s not a secret. A big contributor to this shenanigans is corporate greed. When you ask the question ‘why would you make pilots pay for their training?’, the operator’s counterargument is often a very simple ‘well, why not – if the pilot is willing to pay’?

History has proven time and time again that companies can get away with it, so the people in charge of financial decision making see this as a no-brainer depending on the operator and the region you’re in.

The good old “If pilots are willing to pay, why the hell would we pay for them?” mentality.

It’s basically down to how much weight companies give to safety conscious voices within the organisation, that determines whether or not pay to fly actually gets used. For many yes, for others no.

Lack of Industry Regulation

Regulators have so far not been able to intervene too much to try and stop Pay to Fly practices across the industry. Why? Here are the main reasons:

1) Legal Complexity: Companies will often strive to legally get away with practices that are deemed questionable. So while something might be technically legal, it can still be a shady practice.

2) The Safety Conversation does not often include the Pay to Fly discussion. While it’s considered unfair by many sides, it still doesn’t get classed by a ‘safety risk’ by most regulators, which is why they don’t actively address it.

3) Limited Resources: Regulators focus on the biggest fish first, Pay to Fly is unfortunately still only seen as a ‘small fish’ when it comes to improving the industry.

Globalisation of the Aviation Industry

Aviation is a global industry, and if 1 country decides to actively deal with Pay to Fly, operators can simply move their HQ to another part of the world to get around it. The rules on Pay to Fly are anything but uniform across the globe.

An Increase in the Amount of Profit-Driven Flight Schools

There are so many profit driven flight schools now that this industry is hard to put back in its box. This entire training industry is slowly normalising pilots paying for their own training. Very few countries offer subsidised training for pilots.

For instance, why is becoming a marketing agent subsidised, but being a pilot isn’t? What is the difference, other than the obvious large financial investment that’s required? Plenty of other costly professions are subsidised in many first world countries, yet becoming a pilot is a ‘different story’.

The Rise of Low-Cost Operators

Legacy airlines are the minority now. The rise of the low cost airline has had a massive influence on how common Pay to Fly has been. For similar reasons to the one discussed above, low cost carriers are usually running on tight margins with not a lot of room for investing in staff.

Time Pressure for Pilots to Become Employed

Spending multiple mortgage-deposits on flight training is not particularly helpful for your mental health. Pilots are under immense pressure to make that huge financial investment actually pay off. This increases desperation for jobs, in an industry that can be really volatile with long periods of unemployment at times.

This pressure to find a job however, is part of the reason Pay to Fly continues. Aspiring pilots often feel that they need to pay to get ahead of the competition, because if they don’t someone else will, creating a self-perpetuating problem.

The result?

Pilots who are willing to pay even more money to secure that first job!

It’s a problem that is hard to fix if many inexperienced pilots are getting their credit cards out to try and get a head start over their competitors.

An Unbalanced Power Dynamic

As discussed earlier, the power dynamic between fresh cadet and big fancy airline or operator is hugely out of balance.

All the passion, motivation, and desperation a new pilot out of basic training often feels, all fuel the fire of imbalanced power dynamics between companies and employers.

Too often we see companies letting go of experienced pilots to then hire inexperienced ones, in an attempt to reduce their terms and conditions.

The Safety Consequences of Pay to Fly

Right, so what are the actual short and long term effects of Pay to Fly? We’ve reached out to many pilots, to hear as many different perspectives on this issue as possible.

Here are the 5 biggest safety consequences caused by Pay to Fly:

Even More Financial Pressure on Pilots

To overcome the usual pilot training route hurdles, you unfortunately already need some level of wealth. The biggest hurdles are usually:

1) Moving countries (although not for everyone of course)
2) Paying for all the basic training
3) Having financial security during training to concentrate on what matters
4) Access to quality education to pass selection processes for flight school

Pay to Fly then adds ANOTHER financial hurdle, making this journey even more ridiculously costly.

Helicopter pilots have it even worse when it comes to training cost. In the UK, a helicopter Instrument Rating alone can cost £65,000! You can do an entire fixed wing CPL course for that amount of money…

A Reduction in Diversity on the Flight Deck

Pilots are already a very homogenous group of people. That’s not our opinion, it’s a fact. The results of this often go under the radar, as they’re not super obvious or particularly exciting to talk about. But think about it:

What is the ‘usual’ demographic of people that are successful in becoming a pilot?

A demographic that is able to deal with the 4 items we raised above, you need access to a significant amount of money.

These problems already contribute to a less diverse industry and flight deck, as only people with the means to do it all are able to enter the industry.

Pay to Fly just amplifies the lack of diversity as it makes it even harder to become a pilot if you’re not financially fortunate.

So why is cockpit diversity important?

Many studies have proven that a team that has people with many diverse backgrounds, outperform homogenous teams. This has several reasons, but mainly:

1) Varied perspectives: offer different approaches to problem solving and reduce the risk of groupthink
2) Better communication: cultural awareness and being able to communicate with people with different background will make you a better communicator
3) Increased adaptability: by learning and growing from each others skills and knowledge
4) Broader skillsets: that everyone can benefit from
5) Inclusivity: having a diverse pilot workforce promotes a sense of inclusivity. This is desperately needed in times where there’s a lack of role models for a huge part of society

Reduced Focus on Training Quality

With all these costs, and the company’s ways of trying to work around them, the focus on training quality is completely lost.

Pay to Fly is a controversial topic, and the cost of type ratings and training will have to remain ‘competitive’ for it to be sold to pilots. This means that the training quality will eventually suffer. The focus is now on ‘make it affordable’ rather than ‘make it high quality training’.

If multiple other qualifications are required, and the pilot has to pay for it, he or she is also not focussed on finding quality training, but on finding affordable training! You can rarely have both in this industry.

The Act of Hiring Pilots Turns into Profit Making

There are airlines out there that have ramped up their game even more. Some have even reported profits on the act of hiring pilots alone!

Think about that for a second, the act of hiring becomes a profitable area within the company. Sounds pretty insane right?

Destructive Effects on Pilot Mental Health

And finally, pilot mental health will eventually suffer as well. Many pilots give up along the way because of financial pressure, and are left with a mortgage worth of money in debt.

This can ruin people’s lives, and with Pay to Fly in the mix, this problem is only more serious. The last thing any pilot wants to (or can) do after spending $120,000 on flight training, is spend more money.

All of this affects flight safety in a negative way, and can only be reversed or rectified if the people with the power to do so are helping to tackle this problem. So let’s talk about the options on the table!

What can be Done to Address Pay to Fly?

Get the Regulators Involved, Increase Oversight

Addressing Pay to Fly requires concerted efforts and systematic changes within our industry. One of the best ways to achieve this is to get regulators actively involved and increase oversight.

Regulators should establish a framework that promotes ethical standards. Currently, companies are taking a pro-active approach to try and use (or abuse) regulations in different countries to walk on the line of legal practice.

Increasing oversight means a more vigilant examination of company practices related to pilot training and hiring. Regulators should actively monitor and evaluate the financial aspects of pilot training programs, fees charged for interviews, type ratings, line training etc.

Promote Industry Wide Standards

What is acceptable? What do we consider ‘good enough’ as a standard? Some might say that pushing for no bonds, no pay to fly, and fully paid-for training is too idealistic.

So where’s the middle ground?

Bonds might be a good middle ground. If companies invest in their employees, they want security of that investment.

If a company pays £60,000 for a type rating (not uncommon in the helicopter industry), it’s reasonable to expect some sort of guarantee the employee is not going to run to a competitor within a few months.

The problem is, these standards aren’t widely established, and currently it’s a wild west. We need to establish frameworks and standards for this kind of stuff!

Make Unions Stronger

Luckily, depending on the region you’re in, unions have been actively fighting the Pay to Fly model. The problem is, areas across the globe where unions aren’t as strong will still suffer. In an ideal world, it shouldn’t rely on unions to make sure this doesn’t happen.

However, because an ideal world is still a very long way off, increasing the power of unions is a very effective way (as proven) to combat Pay to Fly, and hold employers accountable for investing in their staff.

Incentivise Investing in Pilot Training

If regulation and unions aren’t successful in this, the other way to go about this is making pilot training more affordable in general. Aviation in a hugely important industry to how we interact with each other as humans.

Governments should be actively investing in making sure it remains sustainable for new talent to enter it. Currently, this is still very rare unfortunately.

Public Awareness Campaigns

Another solution is to make the public more aware of what’s going on. Whichever way you spin it, Pay to Fly IS a threat to flight safety. Who suffers from that? The public!

Yet, at the moment, this isn’t in the public eye whatsoever.

Conclusion

Pay to Fly is an unfortunate reality of aviation that won’t magically disappear if we don’t collectively do anything about it.

Combatting Pay to Fly can only happen with systematic changes within the aviation industry. The most important step for this is to get regulators actively involved and increase oversight.

Have you or anyone you know been affected by Pay to Fly? Share your thoughts with us, as this article will likely get a follow-up article in the future based on what the industry movements are!

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