Aeronautical licenses

You need a certified flight school

To talk about licenses, we now delve into the world of general and commercial aviation that we defined in the previous tutorial when talking about licenses to fly civil “aircraft” in Europe.

First of all, it is necessary to open this tutorial by saying that to obtain any aircraft pilot license, of any category, it is necessary to attend courses at a flight school certified according to European standards. The European body responsible for regulating the aeronautical world is the EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) which, in addition to regulating any flight operation, provides the standards for the training of any flight or ground personnel.

The school certification is called ATO (Approved training Organization) for the Academies that provide courses for all categories or DTO (Declared training organization) for the smaller schools that provide only some specific courses.

License families

The licenses (which in Italy were once called “brevetti” but then the name was Europeanized) are divided first of all by the various categories of existing aircraft that we saw in the previous tutorial.

We repeat them because they are important: airplane, helicopter, airship, convertiplane, glider, hot air balloon (or better free balloon) and drones (or better SAPR: remotely piloted aircraft systems).

As regards the first four categories (airplanes, helicopters, airships and convertiplanes) the licenses are further divided into two large families:

• non-professional pilot licenses: LAPL and PPL (to remain in general aviation)
• professional pilot licenses: CPL or ATPL (to enter the world of commercial aviation)

Instead, for the other categories (gliders and hot air balloons), the license is unique for carrying out commercial activities (being an instructor for a gliding school or carrying paying passengers with free balloons):

• single flight license: SPL and BPL

However, there is the LAPL license for these categories of aircraft, which allows you to fly only light aircraft and obviously does not give access to the course to become an instructor or to carry paying passengers.

Private Pilot License - PPL

The Private Pilot License (acronym PPL: Private Pilot Licence) allows you to fly an aircraft (helicopter, airplane or airship) for tourism purposes, taking friends, relatives, acquaintances around with one goal: to have fun. There must be no profit motive, otherwise it becomes a professional activity and for this you need a commercial pilot license.

With the Private Pilot License there are no limits to flying aircraft or to the number of passengers transported: having the minimum experience requirements – which are different for each type of aircraft – you can access the “qualification” course on any machine (in the next tutorials you will receive all the information on the qualifications and specific post-license courses). Obviously the discriminant is that you cannot do commercial operations, so if you obtain the qualification on a 737… you can only use it to take your friends around!

The Light Aircraft Pilot's License - LAPL

Before continuing, we need to open a small parenthesis. As we mentioned in the previous section, there is also a “subcategory” of the PPL airplane and helicopter licenses and the glider and hot air balloon licenses, which is the LAPL: light aircraft pilot license.

This license offers the possibility of flying, obviously without profit, with aircraft that have certain weight and seat limitations on board (depending on the categories to which it refers). In these tutorials, we will not talk about it in depth because the procedures are exactly the same as those for obtaining the private pilot license, with a little less training, and therefore you get a “reduced” license.

Commercial Pilot License - CPL

At this point you can guess that the Commercial Pilot License is instead necessary for all profit-making operations such as public passenger transport, cargo, mountain work with helicopters, helicopter rescue, or to be hired by a commercial aviation company as a professional pilot. The airline pilot license will be discussed later because it is nothing more than an upgrade of the commercial pilot license.

Instrument Flight Rating - IR

It should also be mentioned that for these categories of aircraft there is a qualification that is practically worth as much as a license: it is the instrument flight qualification or IR (instrument rating) that allows you to fly in low visibility conditions, that is, based only on flight instruments (it is called flight in IFR: instrument flight rules).

If you have not obtained this qualification, you will only be able to fly according to the visual flight rules (VFR: visual flight rules) and you will always have to fly by orienting yourself through what you can see. But let’s not get into too technical issues now… we have mentioned this important qualification because as you continue with the explanations of the courses, you will hear about it many times!

PS: scheduled flights are all IFR.

The MPL license

Another peculiarity, which however only concerns aircraft, is the MPL (multi pilot license) license that allows you to carry out commercial operations (therefore it is superior to the PPL) but only as a co-pilot in a multi-crew.

It is a somewhat strange license and normally only the training departments of airlines provide these courses. In the next tutorials we will not deal with these courses, because they are not steps or phases of the Aeronautical Licenses but stand-alone courses that do not have much meaning on a general level.

Airline Transport Pilot License - ATPL

This license is the one that allows you to exercise the function of commander to pilot an aircraft with multiple crew. It is not obtained in a flight school but by working for an aircraft operator. We have a section dedicated to this somewhat particular license.

Bridge instruction

For all aircraft categories, once you have obtained a license, if you decide to switch from one to another, you can boast credits both for the theoretical courses and exams to be taken, and for the practical part. It is technically called “bridge instruction”, or “bridge instruction”, because it unites the various categories. Also for this you will find a specific tutorial later.

Armed forces

We now want to dedicate a brief in-depth look at the armed forces and the police: military and civilian licenses are not equivalent, that is, they are worth nothing outside their scope.

A civilian pilot cannot fly a military vehicle and vice versa. The first scenario is quite banal and obvious, but the second is not so obvious.

Once upon a time, military pilots had a civilian license by default: now they no longer do, thus limiting their exit from the armed forces, which in the past decades created a considerable economic waste for the public administration because each military pilot cost hundreds of millions of lire in training to the Ministry of Defense and then, once the process was over, the pilot could decide to go and fly as a civilian.

For this reason, right or wrong as you may find it, and for the fact that civil pilots have European standards while military pilots have national standards, it was decided that to “convert” the military license it was necessary to retake the theoretical exams and part of the practical training, depending on the agreements between the specific armed force and ENAC.

Conclusions: landing

For non-European licenses there are theoretical and practical credits depending on the experience, but we will deal with this in one of the last tutorials in this section.

Now that we have understood what a private or commercial pilot license is for, in visual flight or instrument flight, that for gliders and hot air balloons there is only one license and that the military are a world apart, let’s see in detail how these courses are carried out.

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