There are four types of pilot licenses you will have to get familiar with:

• Student pilot’s license
• Private Pilot’s License or PPL
• Commercial Pilot’s License or CPL
• Airline Transport Pilot’s License or ATPL
• (Sport and Recreational licenses aren’t important for your goals, so let’s forget those.)

Take a second to familiarize yourself with these acronyms. It will be good practice for you since aviation is rife with words that consist of only capital letters. Like you wouldn’t believe it. Most pilots forget what the letters stand for eventually.

Then there are certain ratings that can be on your license, of note:

• Instrument Flight Rules or IFR rating
• Multi-engine rating
• Type rating

A type rating is only applicable for aircraft over a certain weight, for example 5.7 ton, or on multi-pilot aircraft (depends on your country). You can fly lighter aircraft without a type rating on your license, but when you want to fly an Airbus or a Boeing, you’ll need a rating for the type, or you can’t fly it.

Type ratings are usually valid for a year or 13 months or so (depends on country), and expire then. That’s one of the reasons pilots need to go into the simulator for a check at regular intervals. It’s also the reason most airline pilots fly only one type of aircraft. Therefore you shouldn’t expect your 787 captain to jump into an A320 or a 737 on his next flight… usually.

I say usually here, because Airbus is known for doing its best to keep their airplanes very similar to operate, which allows pilots rated on one Airbus type to easily familiarize themselves with another Airbus type. Airbus pilots, like yours truly, therefore sometimes hold more than one type rating, depending on their airline’s policy. At one point I was rated on three types simultaneously: Airbus A330, A340 and A350. (That in fact counts by law here as two ratings, since the A330 and A350 can be considered as one single common rating.) Airlines love the flexibility and lower training costs that brings along and therefore buy a few more planes from Airbus.

A multi-engine rating is only applicable to light aircraft, as for the heavy aircraft a type rating applies. It qualifies you to fly… guess what… light aircraft with more than one engine.

An IFR rating allows you to fly on instruments only, without visual reference outside. Unless you have an IFR rating, you’re stuck in the airport’s cantina when the clouds hang low or it’s a rainy day with reduced visibility. Clearly, an airline pilot would be pretty useless to his passengers if he lacks this. IFR ratings usually also only stay valid for a year or 13 months, again forcing airline pilots into the simulator. And hence twice a year we have simulator checks to renew our ratings: once for the type rating, once for the instrument rating. In most countries today the IFR rating stays valid indefinitely, but you may need an annual “proficiency check”; so in practice it often comes down to the same thing.

If you want to know more on the validity of your licenses and ratings, I suggest you check with your local Civil Aviation Administration/Department (CAA/CAD), and/or with the two big ones: the FAA in the USA or the EASA in Europe. If you need to keep ratings valid after your training and haven’t found a job in the sector yet, you may get away with combining them, which means you have to rent less simulator time and save time and money.

Together with your license that has the ratings on it, you also need a medical certificate of the correct class. There are different “classes” (class may be called by a different term In your country). If you aim to fly for airlines you need a “class 1” medical certificate. You are allowed to fly with a lower class in the initial part of your training, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t straight away go for the highest class. If anything, it shows you right away that you may have medical problems.

A normal training curriculum is to first become a student pilot. Then get a PPL next, so you can fly unsupervised on your own and start building up flight hours. With a PPL, you can start impressing your friends and the girls you’ve secretly been fantasizing about, since you can take passengers along – as long as you don’t get paid for it.

Once the PPL is under your belt, the next logical step would be to get the IFR rating. The IFR rating is often the most challenging bit of the training.

When you are a Private Pilot (owner of a PPL) with an IFR rating, the next step is to try and make a buck out of flying by doing a CPL. A CPL allows you to get paid for flying services rendered.

It’s also useful now to start flying on airplanes with more than one engine. You usually need a multi-engine rating at some point, and since it’s more expensive to fly airplanes with two engines than with one, people mostly hold that off until after the IFR.

At this point it’s often a matter of inexperience that prevents you from moving into an airline. Airlines don’t really like green newbies with no experience, as they are a liability. Having a CPL allows eager pilots to make money and build up hours in other ways than flying in an airline, for example by becoming an instructor on small aircraft, or by doing some air taxi work, aerial photography or surveillance, or something along those lines.

This is where the paths between doing all this on your own and doing all this in an airline cadet program differ. In a cadet program, or ab-initio program, you don’t stop until you’re all done and start in the airline. When doing it on your own, which is perfectly possible, you are more likely to use that CPL and get paid already; flying is expensive. That also means some people get sidetracked here into flying private jets or other aviation jobs, and forget about the airlines, sometimes permanently, sometimes for a little while.

The ATPL, in the meantime, is mainly a matter of theoretical knowledge and doing the exams in all the required subjects. Some countries have a so called “frozen ATPL”. Someone who has a frozen ATPL passed all the exams but hasn’t got the required experience yet, and/or hasn’t done a required check in a simulator or actual flight yet. Commercial Pilots (holders of a CPL) don’t have to wait until the day they can become captain of an airliner to do this ATPL theory, so they usually start early (unless they follow the American system, where you first need 1,500 flight hours). Indeed, airlines often demand a frozen or full ATPL from their applicants, so it’s better to just get it all out of the way early. Other airlines also hire pilots with only a CPL, but they can never become a captain until they get their ATPL then.

Note that the FAA (the American system) and the EASA (the European system) approach this ATPL differently. The FAA requires that you to have flown quite a bit of hours (1,500) already before you can do an ATPL, but the exam is easy. The EASA demands more in depth knowledge, but you can do all the subjects early on. To “unfreeze” the ATPL, you’ll then need enough experience on a multi-crew airplane. Find out in your country how it works there.

Finally, one more thing to go: the expensive type rating. I wish I could say that like in the good old days the airlines take care of this when they hire you. Alas, it has become more and more of a thing for airlines to require of their applicants that they have a type rating already. They can then start to fly on the airplanes in their fleet with minimum training costs. Most of my colleagues would agree with me that that’s a terrible practice that snuck into the industry. Unfortunately, it may be one you’ll have to accept.

There are however still a lot of airlines that will take care of your type rating for you, but they may require you to sign a bond. That bond is a contract between you and the airline that you have to serve a number of years with them (typically 2 or3 for a type rating) so that they didn’t train you for their rivals. If you want to leave earlier you typically have to pay them back all, or part of the costs of the training, or a specific amount agreed upon in the contract.

This whole business of getting the required licenses and acquiring the needed experience takes some time. You should expect being occupied with this intensively and full time for a minimum of 18 months, more likely 2 years. If you’re not doing this full time then expect longer.

Meanwhile the costs pile up. Flying isn’t cheap. I will refuse sticking a number of dollars on this, as my training was too long ago and inflation and new training programs would have altered that number anyway. I suggest you do your own research about this.

We’ll talk about money in the next post.