Licences
What lets you fly a type, where to see yours, when it expires and how to keep it.
Licences
A licence here is a type rating: permission to fly one aircraft family. Without it the aircraft picker will not offer you that type.
There is one place a rating comes from, and it is the Academy. There is no other door — not the Store, not an admin favour, not seniority.
You cannot buy a rating. You buy the training
This is the part people get wrong, so it is worth saying plainly.
The Store sells fleet cards, and it sells extensions that make the site more useful. It does not sell permission to fly. Older Store items that looked like type unlocks were removed in August 2026, because they took money and changed nothing: the rating still had to be issued by hand afterwards.
"Buying a licence" means paying for a course. You enrol, read the theory, pass the exam, fly the practical and pass the check ride. The rating is issued when the course is complete — and only then.
The system checks this on a schedule rather than trusting a single moment: once an hour it re-reads the rule "a pilot should hold rating T if they have a completed, unexpired enrolment on a course leading to T", and makes reality match. If a trainer fixes a status by hand, or a course is renewed, or something fails halfway, it settles itself within the hour.
Ratings issued by hand by an administrator are never touched by that job. It only ever removes what it granted itself.
Your first rating is on the company
Pass the entry exam and the practical, and the company pays for your first type rating in full — on the type you were examined on. The money stays with you.
That is deliberate. You can spend it on a second type instead, which opens more contracts and longer routes straight away. Most people should.
After the first one, you pay. How much the company chips in depends on your reputation with them:
| Reputation | Company pays | You owe in flying |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | nothing | — |
| 40 | half | 25 hours |
| 70 | all of it | 50 hours |
The company share is capped by what the airline actually has in the bank.
Where to see what you hold
Your profile — a Licences card listing every rating you hold, where it came from, when it expires and how many days are left. Ratings you could still add are listed underneath, with what each one costs.
Dashboard — a warning appears when a rating is within 30 days of expiry, and stays until it is renewed.
Academy → Certificates — every certificate you have been issued, with its issue and expiry date, and how many are still valid.
My Training — the courses you are enrolled on and where you are in each one.
When it expires
A type rating is good for 365 days from the day the course completed.
At 30 days out the dashboard starts warning you. That number is not a setting anyone can quietly change; it is written once, in one place, and the text you read is generated from it.
If a rating lapses, the hourly job removes it, and the aircraft of that type stop being offered to you. Nothing else is taken away — your hours, your rank, your reputation and your certificates all stay. You simply cannot dispatch that type until the rating is current again.
Keeping it current
Renewal is a separate course: the PROF CHECK for that type, at a fifth of the price. You enrol on it exactly the way you enrolled on the original — there is no special renewal button, because there does not need to be one.
| Type | Rating | Annual check |
|---|---|---|
| A320 | $40,000 | PC26-A320 · $8,000 |
| B737 | $45,000 | PC26-B737F · $9,000 |
| MD11 | $90,000 | PC26-MD11F · $18,000 |
| B777 | $120,000 | PC26-B777F · $24,000 |
| B747 | $150,000 | PC26-B747 · $30,000 |
Holding every one of them costs $89,000 a year to keep current, before you have flown anywhere.
Both courses lead to the same rating, and the hourly check does not care which of them earned it. So the moment your check is complete, the clock starts again from that course — 365 more days — even though the original rating course has long expired.
The check is named for its year. PC26-A320 is the 2026 check; 2027 will
have its own, and that is deliberate — an annual check that reused the
same course would have no way to tell this year's exam from last year's.
The figure under that table is what it costs to keep everything current for a year, before you have flown anywhere. That is the whole argument against collecting ratings you do not use. Hold what you actually fly.
Check the Academy page before you count on a renewal. A check programme that shows as not yet open is not taking enrolments — the course exists and the price is set, but its exam is still being written. Ask a trainer if yours is close to expiry and its check is not open.
Why there is a clock on it at all
Because a rating that never expires stops meaning anything after the first month, and the Academy becomes a thing you did once. The annual check is what keeps training part of flying here rather than a gate you walk through and forget.
It is also the honest version of how the real thing works, which is the standard the rest of this site is held to.
