One of our past students, Sarah Dunglinson, who gained her private pilot’s licence in 2015 has recently completed her commercial pilot training and landed a job with Ryanair flying the Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
Sarah started training for her PPL at Bristol and Wessex obtaining her private pilot’s licence back in 2015, shortly after Sarah started studying for the ATPLs in the Spring of 2016. After completing the CPL and MCC/JOC Sarah completed all her training in October 2017 and was ready to start applying for jobs with the airlines.
During training at Bristol and Wessex Sarah learnt to fly on the Cessna 172 before advancing to the Diamond DA-42 for the instrument rating and commercial training. In total from start to finish the entire training took a total of 20 months.
For this article we spoke with Sarah and asked her some questions regarding her training:
What made you want to become a commercial pilot?
“I was brought up in an aviation family, both my dad and my uncle were commercial pilots, my aunt was also cabin crew in the airlines, plus aviation was always something that I was interested in from an early age. I started gliding at the age of 14 and that’s where I believe my passion for aviation became evident and so I knew I wanted to pursue it as a career.”
What were the main parts you enjoyed most about your training?
“For me I really enjoyed the hour building part of my training, this helped improve my skills and put everything I had learnt from training into practice, I flew to various airports and this helped me become more competent with radio calls. The MCC stage of my training was also very enjoyable as I felt for the first time like an airline pilot as we flew the Boeing 737 simulator as well as learning the basics of working within a crew and to standard operating procedures which would become useful for your first airline job.”
Were there any aspects of training you didn’t enjoy?
“To be honest there wasn’t much that I didn’t like about any of my training, the only area would be the ATPL theory exams, I was never great at exams so found these a slight struggle.”
When training for your PPL at Bristol and Wessex who was your instructor?
“During my PPL training my instructors were Nafis and Lavinia, when I took my night rating this was completed by Phil, my dad who also completed some check flights with me to ensure I wasn’t picking up any bad habits.”
What would you tell others who are starting out and want to become a commercial pilot?
“To become a commercial pilot it is a long, tough road and there will be setbacks during the training, my advice to anyone is no matter how many times you get knocked down you just need to keep pushing through, the reward at the end is totally worth it!”
From all of us at Bristol and Wessex Aeroplane Club we wish Sarah Dunglinson well with her new career with Ryanair.
If you would like to find out about obtaining your private pilots licence, please get in touch with us or visit our PPL page to find out more.