The airline pilot's license
This tutorial was created to clarify the terminology of the licenses because the words “airline pilot license” are sometimes misunderstood.
As we have already said in other tutorials, we forgive certain mistakes to journalists or neophytes, but if you are an enthusiast or a future pilot, you need to know this difference.
The airline pilot license for airplanes or helicopters (ATPL acronym that you have seen in many previous tutorials) is not a license that you get in a flight school.
Although it may seem strange, this license is obtained in an airline.
The only thing that a school can offer you is the ATPL theoretical course, that course that you can attend during your studies to become a commercial pilot and that includes both the theoretical part for the commercial license (CPL), and the theoretical part for the instrument flight rating (IR).
We have described this course as advantageous in the previous tutorials because it is two courses in one (CPL + IR) and that the instrument flight rating is very important and therefore it is worth obtaining it immediately, however now we can also add another advantage of this course, because it is almost worth a rating in itself!
ATPL frozen
Once you have passed the theoretical exams, it is said that you have obtained a “frozen ATPL”, that is, that you have frozen your theoretical knowledge until you have the minimum requirements to take the practical exam (which are 1,500 total flight hours on an airplane or 1,000 hours on a helicopter, of which a part of instrument flight, a part at night and a part flying in a multi-crew).
Why then do I have to take the course if I don’t take an exam to become an airline pilot?
THE FIGURE OF THE AIRLINE CO-PILOT
Let’s take a step back: with the commercial pilot license (obtained with modular or integrated), the instrument flight qualification, the MCC (multi crew coordination) course and the ATPL theoretical exams, you can become an airline pilot… that is, you can become an airline co-pilot.
The distinction lies in this small clarification: a pilot who works in an airline flies with planes that require two people to be piloted, that is, he flies in a “multi-crew” that is composed of a commander and a co-pilot: to be an airline co-pilot it is necessary to have the basic requirements of a professional (CPL + IR + MCC + ATPL frozen) while to be the commander it is necessary to have the Airline Pilot License (ATPL).
Now, it would have been much simpler if instead of airline pilot license, they had called it a multi-crew commander license…. However, that’s how it works!
RECAP
Airline pilot is the job you are doing and not the license you have obtained, so to summarize:
So the schools that promote courses to become airline pilots do not sell courses to obtain the ATPL license, they simply try to cut all this explanation that we have given you by saying that with their courses you can go to work in an airline as a co-pilot!
It is just a commercial translation of what we have said… to simplify the promotion a bit.
There is still a little curiosity: for the frozen ATPL the commutative property does not apply:
if ATPL = CPL + IR, it is not true that CPL + IR = ATPL
So if you want to take a CPL theoretical exam (because maybe it seems easier to you and there are fewer subjects and then you do the instrument flight qualification with its specific theoretical exam, you have not obtained an ATPL and you will have to retake all the exams again; in reality there are some credits but not for all the subjects.
Don’t ask us why it works like this… from our point of view a student who obtains the CPL and then the IR takes more exams than an ATPL because some subjects have to be taken twice. Given that the European exam database is the same for each subject and that the exam only changes in the number of questions, this is inexplicable. But if you take a complete ATPL exam you will not have this problem.
If you have any questions or curiosities, fill out the information request form.
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