Inside Become a Pilot: What Students Learned This Week

This week on Become a Pilot, students explored some of the fundamental science behind flight while beginning to understand what it actually takes to progress towards a professional pilot career.

The Academy isn't designed simply to teach young people interesting facts about aeroplanes. Each session connects aviation knowledge, GCSE and A-Level Maths and Physics, pilot aptitude and career preparation to help students start developing the foundations they will need later in their journey.

Understanding How an Aircraft Flies

This week's aviation knowledge focused on the Principles of Flight.

Students explored the four forces acting on an aircraft: lift, weight, thrust and drag before looking more closely at the physics that allows an aircraft weighing tens of tonnes to become airborne.

We covered:

• Newton's Laws and their application to flight

• Aerofoils and airflow

• Bernoulli's Principle

• Static and dynamic pressure

• Angle of attack

• Lift and the lift equation

• Stalls and the critical angle of attack

Importantly, students weren't simply given definitions to remember.

They applied Maths and Physics to aviation problems, using calculations and scenarios to understand why changing variables such as speed, density or angle of attack affects an aircraft.

Connecting School Subjects to the Flight Deck

One of the key aims of Become a Pilot is to show students why the Maths and Science they're studying at school matter.Concepts such as forces, pressure, density, vectors, equations and proportional relationships can sometimes feel abstract in a classroom.

Put them into the context of flying an aircraft and suddenly they have a purpose.

That ability to take academic knowledge, understand it and apply it to a practical problem becomes increasingly important as students progress towards professional flight training and, eventually, ATPL theoretical study.

Becoming a Pilot Is About More Than Flying

The second part of the session moved away from aerodynamics and looked at the career itself.

Students explored different professional pilot careers and the routes available to reach the flight deck, including:

• Integrated and modular flight training

• Airline-funded cadet programmes

• The stages involved in professional pilot training

• What airlines look for when selecting future pilots

• The importance of academic ability, communication and professionalism

For a young person interested in aviation, understanding the pathway early can be incredibly valuable. Rather than simply thinking “I want to be a pilot”, students can begin identifying the qualifications, skills and behaviours they need to develop over the coming years.

Building the Foundations Early

Professional pilot selection can assess far more than someone's ability to fly.

Throughout Become a Pilot, students develop their understanding of areas including numerical reasoning, problem solving, communication, teamwork, situational awareness, decision making, aptitude and the nine pilot competencies.

Future sessions bring those skills together with subjects including meteorology, aircraft systems, performance, mass and balance, navigation, aviation Maths, human performance, CRM, threat and error management and airline selection.

The objective isn't to replace professional flight training.

It's to help aspiring pilots arrive at that stage better informed, academically prepared and with a much clearer understanding of what the profession will demand from them and able to write a winning application for flight training, ideally funded by an airline.

Missed This Intake? Join the Winter Academy

The Winter Become a Pilot Academy is now enrolling. Across 10 live online sessions, aspiring pilots will combine aviation knowledge with applied GCSE and A-Level Maths and Physics, pilot aptitude, career planning and preparation for future flight training and airline selection.

Students receive live tuition, comprehensive learning materials and workbooks, practice questions, aptitude exercises and access to session recordings for revision.

The programme costs £250 to secure a place followed by three monthly payments of £250.

If becoming a professional pilot is the goal, the journey can start long before the first professional flying lesson.

Winter enrolment is now open.