A European flight student's Reddit post highlights a recurring pain point in ab initio pilot training: the difficulty of transferring between Approved Training Organisations (ATOs) mid-course, particularly after a failed skill test. The poster describes being with the same school for two and a half years, citing extended and allegedly unnecessary additional training requirements, a failed CPL skill test attributed partly to instructor and traffic-conflict factors beyond the student's control, and pressure to sign a document seemingly shifting blame despite the instructor remaining pilot-in-command for the flight. With only the skill test and APS MCC (Airline Pilot Standards Multi-Crew Cooperation) course remaining, the student is weighing whether to leave and finish training at another provider, anticipating the current school will withhold training records and documentation as a retaliatory or financial lever.
This scenario touches on a structural weakness in the EASA training ecosystem that experienced pilots and flight instructors will recognize. Under EASA Part-FCL, training records, logbook endorsements, and ATO-issued progress documentation are the property of the student, and Competent Authorities (national CAAs) generally require ATOs to release these records upon request, though enforcement varies significantly by member state and schools sometimes use administrative friction as a de facto penalty for departing students. Any pilot who has interacted with an underfunded or commercially aggressive ATO knows the incentive structure: schools operating on thin margins or aggressive growth targets can extend syllabi, mandate extra "consolidation" hours, or use ambiguous accountability language after an incident to protect their own liability and revenue stream, at the direct financial and career expense of the trainee.
For working pilots and training captains, the PIC-responsibility question raised in the post is worth flagging to anyone mentoring students or new-hire cadets. An instructor occupying the right seat as PIC during a CPL skill test or training flight retains ultimate legal responsibility for the safe conduct of that flight, including traffic separation and decision-making, regardless of any post-flight documentation a student is asked to sign. Airlines and cadet-sponsorship programs that source pilots from ATO pipelines have a vested interest in this issue, since disputes over fault, incomplete records, or delayed licensing can directly affect a cadet's timeline to type rating and line training, and insurers/regulators increasingly scrutinize how training incidents are documented and attributed.
More broadly, this case is a symptom of the volume-driven pressure across the global training pipeline as airlines rebuild pilot pipelines post-pandemic and cadet demand has outstripped some ATOs' capacity to deliver consistent, transparent instruction. Prospective and current trainees are increasingly advised — by CAAs, pilot unions, and forums like r/flying — to retain personal copies of all training records contemporaneously, understand their national CAA's rules on record portability before enrolling, and treat any request to sign liability-shifting documents with the same scrutiny they'd apply to an incident report at an airline. As mentorship networks and type-rating organizations continue to field these transfer disputes, they reinforce a broader industry conversation about ATO accountability, standardized record-transfer protocols, and the need for regulators to more actively enforce existing student-protection provisions rather than leaving cadets to negotiate leverage individually against schools that control their path to a commercial license.