The map should be free

Everything I needed to know at the start was knowable. Almost none of it was free. Between me and a straight answer sat a layer of agents, consultants and admissions counsellors, all happy to explain the path for a fee, and all quietly steering it toward whichever school paid them the most. Aspirants lose lakhs, and sometimes years, to guidance that was never really about them.

I do not think the people in that layer are villains. I think the incentive is broken, and that the repair is simply to publish the answers. So that is what this is: the stages, the costs, the exams, the medicals and the routes, in order, with the sources to check them against, plus the tools aspirants usually pay somebody else to run for them.

The problem is not wrong information. It is paid information.

Look at where pilot-training information in India actually comes from. The blogs, the brochures, the seminars, the videos, the counsellor who rings you back within ten minutes: nearly all of it is published by flying schools and academies, or by agents who earn a commission on every student they deliver to one.

Very little of it is outright false, which is exactly what makes it hard to spot. The bias lives in what gets left out. The costs that appear after the headline fee. The delays that are normal rather than exceptional. The school that is genuinely good, for somebody who is not you. And the answer nobody selling a course can afford to give, which is sometimes not yet, or not this way, or not at all.

No academy can publish the honest comparison, because the honest comparison costs it enrolments. That is arithmetic rather than villainy, and it means the map has to come from somewhere else: from someone who earns nothing whichever school you pick. Nobody pays me when you enrol. That is the design of this site, and every other rule here follows from it.

Who I am

I am Pranit Badhwar. I fly the A320 for a major Indian airline: about five years in aviation, three of them with an airline, and 1,700+ hours logged.

Recency matters more than seniority for the decision you are facing. I sat the current DGCA papers, went through the Class 1 process as it runs today, dealt with eGCA, and chose a school from the same shortlist you are building now. I remember what those decisions cost, in money and in months, because it was recent and because it was mine. This site is what I wish somebody had handed me then.

I write and check what goes up here, and my name is on it. If something is wrong, it is wrong under my name, which is rather the point.

What this site stands for

• The information stays free. Every lesson, every tool, every school profile. No paywall, no login, no email wall, no locked chapter at the end.
• Sourced and dated. Regulatory claims are checked against an official source and carry the date they were verified, so you can see for yourself when ours has gone stale.
• No commission on where you train. No per-student fee from any school in India or abroad, no placement fee, no position in a ranking that anyone can buy. That is the commission that bends advice, and it would recreate the exact incentive this site exists to fight.
• The uncomfortable answer, out loud. That your budget may not reach. That the sensible move today might be to wait. That this career may not suit you at all.
• Not knowing is allowed. Where a figure is not independently confirmed it is labelled unverified, because a confident guess is worse than an honest gap.
• Money is disclosed where it happens. Where this site does carry an affiliate link, for practice software or gear, it earns a commission and says so on the page it sits on. The whole list is written out in one place.

What is free, and what is not

All of the above is free and will stay free. Money enters this site in a small number of marked places, and they are set out in full on how we make money: labelled affiliate links for things aspirants need anyway. That is the list.

The one-to-one pathway mentorship is not on it, because it is free, and that is deliberate. This site exists to argue that pathway information in India is sold by people whose advice follows their commission, and putting a price on the last mile of that information would undercut the argument. It costs me time rather than money. If your question is already answered here, I will tell you so and send you to the page instead of taking up a slot.

The other thing I am building

This site comes from the same desk as Be Airline Ready, a paid tool for pilots preparing for airline assessments. It has not launched yet. It is ours, so I will point at it openly rather than pretend the two are unrelated, and you never need it to use anything here.

Get in touch

Write to me at hello@beapilot.in. I read what arrives there myself.

Corrections are the most useful mail I get. If something on this site is out of date or plainly wrong, tell me and I will fix it and update the verified date. If you run a school and believe your listing is unfair, send your side and it goes up alongside your entry. The rules I hold myself to are written out in the editorial policy.