This Review Overall Rating
I studied at L3's Nursling ground school for six months, their New Zealand centre for eight months and then to Nursling and Bournemouth to finish the instrument rating followed by an A320 type rating.
I had very high hopes for my time with L3, their advertising is very slick and gives the impression of a very professional training organisation with the trainee pilot at the centre of their operation. Sadly by the end of the first week, it was abundantly clear that this couldn't be further from the truth. L3 is solely there to maximise the profit made per student and this is done by having maximum class sizes, minimum training footprint and treating the training as a production line.
The accommodation we stayed in for ground school was, at best, university house level. L3 had clearly gone out to tender for the cheapest student houses they could get hold of and just left us there. Southampton is fab, just don't expect to be staying in the Hilton.
The instructors were generally good but there was zero capacity for any kind of reaction to the operation which meant if there was anything such as instructor absence then we were either just sent home on a 'computer-based training day', code for sit at home on your iPad and don't disturb us, or had a filler instructor totally unqualified for the particular subject.
We sat our exams at around the time EASA began to update their question banks and L3 were wholly unprepared. The mock exams were simply a selection of old bank questions they had pasted into a document with zero effort which meant many students would skip into the exams with inflate confidence and then get sorely hurt in the exams when having to answer actual questions rather than recall bank answers.
Our class size was 24 throughout ground school which was ridiculous. Given how little time was spent per subject (some subjects got as little as two days) this meant there was next to no chance to geet tailored assistance with understanding topics.
Onto the flying again the instructors were good but in New Zealand you were, again, treated as nothing more than a number and the attitude was always that L3 was doing you a favour by allowing you to be there; totally ignoring the close to £100k each student had paid for the privilege. We were told each afternoon, sometimes as late as 5pm what we would be doing the next day This meant that you could at some points go for 10 days without a single flight but with absolutely no indication of what the plan was there was no opportunity to use that time to do something so it meant there were some very long periods of sitting around the accommodation bored with nothing to do.
The pettiness and profit squeezing was apparent that in the accommodation each student was limited to only 40GB of internet a month, in 2016. The accommodation was miles out of town in the middle of nowhere and with limited access to vehicles, this meant we couldn't even just watch endless films to get through it. There is a reason the accommodation is referred to by the students as an 'open prison'.
The eight months spent doing the CPL phase could easily have been done in five months but, as said, the student is at the bottom of the priority list so don't expect any effort to get you through the training in a timely manner.
Back to the UK for the instrument rating and type rating. The training was better at this point but the aircraft are some of the oldest of their type in the world so there were availability issues. Type rating was relatively transactional. Pushed through the theory stage as quickly as possible, simulator slots changed at a moments notice and the sims themselves old and clanky. Part of our final check was to fly a 3.2-degree RNav, not helped by the sim being coded for 3 degrees. Our LST slot was a late slot finishing in the early hours. That morning the instructor had done his own revalidation and told us here was just there to get some more cash. He was evidently knackered as it was his second sim that day and hurried us through the check as quickly as he could.
I got my licence and passed everything I needed to but I paid a premium for a glossy brochure. Looking back, going through L3 (at the time it was called CTC) was a mistake on my part and one I wouldn't wish anyone else to have to make.
Course(s) taken:
General
Aircraft
Simulators
Theoretical Training
Practical Training
