Few schools publish training durations, for a simple reason: they vary enormously from one student to another. We publish them anyway — not promises, but measurements, extracted from our completed training files since 2015. Here is what they say, and above all what explains them.
The observed figures
For the private pilot licence, one student in three obtains the licence in under five and a half months from the first theory class; half in a little over seven months. For the multi-engine instrument rating taken as one block, one student in three finishes in under five months. The complete professional course, from the first PPL class to the commercial licence, takes about three and a half years at the median for those who followed it entirely with us — and the fastest complete it in under two years and nine months. The detailed figures are on the private pilot and airline pilot pages.
What sets the duration
The spread of these durations is no accident, and it does not primarily reflect the difficulty of the training. Three factors dominate.
The student’s availability, first: the majority of our students train alongside a job or studies, and it is their calendar — not the school’s — that paces the flights. Regularity, next: two flights a week build progress faster than eight flights packed into one month followed by a pause, because every interruption means reconsolidating what was learned. And the Belgian weather, which imposes its share of postponements, especially early in training when exercises require good conditions.
How to move fast
For the student who has the time and wants to progress at the fastest sustainable pace, the main lever is planning: announce your availability well in advance, accept weekday slots, and link theory and practice without dead time between modules. Students who organise themselves this way end up in the first third of our statistics — private licence in under six months, multi-engine instrument rating in four to five months as one block.
For a candidate facing a deadline — an airline selection, a move abroad — we set up a training calendar at enrolment that reserves the necessary slots. Raise it at your first contact: that is exactly the kind of constraint a well-planned course absorbs.
An honest caveat
These durations are measurements of the past, not commitments about the future: yours will depend on your availability, your regularity and the weather. What the school guarantees is the framework: theory sessions planned and published in our schedule, a fleet of eighteen aircraft and two simulators, and flight planning that follows your availability rather than the other way round.