Family has not ‘slept or eaten’ since €85k pilot training course suspension
Eleven days ago, trainee pilots in the US were told that their €85,000 course was being suspended due to a failure by Pilot Training College (PTC) in Co Waterford to make promised payments to the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), their US teaching partner.
Its understood that up to €1m could be outstanding. Both sides are now locked in a legal battle, with PTC accusing its Florida colleagues of breach of contract.
Due to PTC’s perilous financial situation, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) yesterday called its senior management into a meeting and told them they were stripping its training accreditation from them.
All day yesterday families who paid up €85,000 for their children’s flight training made contact with the Irish Examiner, many of them terrified to go public for fear it may compromise the slim hope their children have of resuming their piloting training.
One man, based in the UK, said they felt “helpless”. They had “mortgaged their future” to ensure their child got a chance to live his dream of flying.
“We know of no one we can turn to for assistance. We are entirely at the mercy of PTC who seem to be stonewalling every request for information,” he said.
“Much like everyone else, we have mortgaged our future and have been left in a state of limbo and are worried senseless that not only have we lost our money, which we can ill afford to do.
“More importantly our son’s education and future has been taken away from him as we are in no position to pay for another course.
“We put our trust and money in what we thought was a respected and trusted [the] Irish flight school and now we have nowhere to turn.”
Another student said the €85,000 charged by PTC in fees was only the beginning. “In reality it costs much more, they are constantly finding new ways to charge us,” he said.
One woman said her son, who travelled to the US at the end of last year, was in Florida for 12 weeks before he began flight training due to the difficulties between FIT and PTC.
Another said: “It is appalling. Everybody’s dreams have been shattered.”
There are about 180 students in the Florida facility and 37 in Waterford at various stages of training. The students are both sponsored students from international airlines and those with individual commercial contracts with PTC.
PTC has a commercial relationship with FIT to provide flight and ground training to its students. Contracts between self-sponsored or airline-sponsored students and their training organisation are outside the remit of the IAA.
