The Rise of the Airline Cadet Program: Ensuring the Best Outcomes for Everyone Involved

Lately, there's been a noticeable trend of airlines announcing new cadet programs or expanding existing ones. This presents a fantastic opportunity for airlines, their partner flight schools, and aspiring pilots alike. Here at Aeroplanned, we’ve spent years planning and delivering these programs. Now, as we collaborate with various clients, we see these programs executed with varying levels of success. So, what are our thoughts on the benefits of these program and the pitfalls to avoid?

Benefits of Airline Cadet Programs

Successful delivery of a cadet program is marked by students finishing on time and achieving high standards, facilitated by a strong, trusted partnership between the airlines and their flight school partners.

When well-executed, cadet programs allow airlines to secure and control their pilot recruitment pipeline, ensuring that standardized, high-quality graduates are ready to meet current and future recruitment targets. These pilots are often bonded for a period, reducing early attrition.

For partner flight schools, cadet programs can guarantee student numbers (and revenue!) and attract high-quality candidates motivated by the structured path towards an airline career. Students in the cadet programs can concentrate fully on their training, knowing that each step is designed to prepare them comprehensively for their future role.

While beneficial to all involved when done well, often the complexity of these programs is underestimated, and things don’t go so smoothly. Here are some thoughts from the Aeroplanned team to help make things go as well as possible.

Setting Up for Success

Both the airline and the flight school need a clear understanding of requirements before they even start or sign the contract. How many instructors and aircraft are needed for the program? Are there additional examiner requirements? What is the timeframe, and how does the required pace of training measure up against the current average pace at the flight school? Consider the size of the cohorts and the stagger of start dates. Are these creating unmanageable peaks and inefficient troughs?

We have seen firsthand the impact of winning a cadet program without having (or planning to have) the resources in place to deliver it. Significant delays occur not just for the airline cadets, but also for the other students at the flight school, who are often severely impacted. It’s frustrating and disheartening for everyone involved.

It's crucial that all parties understand and are realistic about the operational implications of the cadet numbers before finalizing the terms, or you're setting up for a stressful ride.

Delivering the Courses

The best success we see is when the ‘cohort’ is managed together, their progress compared weekly against an on-time timeline. Slower students in the group are sped up, and faster students are monitored to ensure they don’t get too far ahead - unless an intentional stagger is set for flight testing or anticipated bottlenecks.

The required end date at the flight school is critical for aligning the next stages of the cadet program. This should always be visible and tracked towards. Instructors and schedulers need to understand the weekly targets – how many lessons need to be completed? Delays, whether due to performance issues or circumstances beyond the students’ control, are often hard to catch up, so they need to be addressed as soon as they are identified.

Reporting

The airline often has its own set of required metrics. While these can vary widely, they ultimately come down to the airline needing to trust that the flight school is ensuring cadets are tracking at the required standard and pace.

From experience, overly complex reporting requirements are often set due to a lack of visibility of student progress, a prevalent problem in this industry. However, excessive reporting takes time away from the flight school managing the cadets, and often it doesn’t provide that essential visibility anyway. Filling out extensive spreadsheets and spending many days a month just to meet reporting requirements isn’t the best use of anyone’s time. We advocate for clear, concise, standardized information about the cadets’ progress that the airline can access as needed. The report should just be visibility of what is actually happening, allowing the airline to confidently plan the next stages of the cadets’ journey.

Assessing Success

It's important to check in and see if the program is working for everyone:

• What is the average timeframe of the course compared to the plan?
• Are there times when students slow down, whether due to seasonal or syllabus-related factors?
• How many hours are flown compared to the plan?
• Are certain phases within the syllabus requiring repeats and resulting in overflown hours?
• What is the average attrition rate?

And more importantly, using this information, what can be improved for the next course? This might include selection criteria, start dates, cohort sizes, syllabus adjustments, and planned timeframes.

We know cadet programs very well and have designed Aeroplanned to assist with every aspect of them. It’s a challenging process, but when executed correctly, cadet programs can be immensely beneficial for everyone involved.

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you.