Andy Burnham told to tear down six-figure paywall blocking new pilots.

Ahead of his appointment on Monday as Prime Minister, the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) has called on Andy Burnham to make pilot training an affordable option for everyone with the ambition and talent.

BALPA Head of Public Affairs, Stuart Bonar, said, “Pilot training can cost trainee pilots well over £100,000, with no access to student loans or high street bank career loans. For those who cannot get onto the shrinking number of massively oversubscribed airline-funded programmes, it can be a stark choice between parents and family helping out, if they can, or having to give up on their dream career. A lot of that family help needs to be repaid too, with one in seven student pilots, for example, remortgaging property to pay for training, most often the parents’ home.

“In his Manchester speech last month, Andy Burnham spoke powerfully about bringing back ‘working class aspiration’. He said everyone should have the chance to be everything they can be and that achieving that is ‘what we’ll do’. In today’s acceptance speech as the new Labour leader, he spoke about apprenticeships, just like the pilot apprenticeship.  The work to deliver all this should start with tearing down the six-figure paywall that stands between an aspiring pilot and a place on a training course. Those places should absolutely be competitive, and not everyone who wants a place can get a place, but nobody should be excluded simply because they can’t afford it.

“Training to become a commercial airline pilot is rightly demanding and challenging. It should be because we only want the very best to be flying commercial airliners. But the ability to find a six-figure sum of money to pay for training should not be one of the hurdles aspiring pilots need to clear. It is irrelevant to their ability to fly us safely around the country, around Europe, and the world. Andy Burnham can demonstrate his commitment to social mobility by asking the Department for Transport as a matter of urgency to choose a workable solution from among the many options available so that talent and ambition are the only barriers facing trainee pilots.”

BALPA (British Airline Pilots’ Association) is the union and professional association for pilots in the UK, representing over 10,000 members.