Where to train if you want to fly somewhere else

Flight training is one of the few things people happily buy in another country without checking whether it works at home. The brochures are good, the weather is better, and the price often is too. What the brochures are quieter about is that a licence is not a qualification in the way a degree is.

A licence belongs to the authority that issued it. Train in one country, and that is whose licence you hold — wherever you happen to live afterwards.

What that actually means

If you train somewhere and then want to fly commercially somewhere else, you convert. Converting is an ordinary, well-trodden process and not a disaster. It is simply a second process with its own exams, its own paperwork, its own medical and its own bill, arriving at the end of the first one.

The trap is not that conversion exists. It is that people discover it after choosing where to train, when it has become a cost they must absorb rather than a factor they could have weighed.

Decide where you want to work first

This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. The sequence that saves money is:

1. Where do you want to be flying in five years? Not which airline — which country, and on what right to live there. A licence you can convert is no use without a visa that lets you work.
2. What does that country's authority require of a foreign licence holder? Every authority publishes this. It is the single document that should shape the decision.
3. Now choose where to train — knowing what the second process will ask of you, rather than finding out later.

Sometimes the answer is still “train abroad”. Training in a country with cheap flying and predictable weather, then converting, can genuinely come out ahead — particularly where the two authorities have an arrangement that makes the conversion light. Sometimes it does not. The point is to know which before you book, not after.

Things that decide it either way

• Your right to live there. Citizenship, residency or a working visa usually decides this before licensing does. It is also the part with the longest lead time, so start it first.
• Whether the two authorities have an arrangement. Some pairs of countries have agreements that make conversion substantially lighter. They are specific, they are published, and they change.
• Whether you can build hours where you trained. A licence is the start; the hours are what gets you hired. If you cannot legally work as an instructor or a charter pilot in your training country, you will be converting far earlier than planned.
• What your logbook looks like on paper. Converting means proving your experience in the format the new authority expects. A logbook kept in that shape from day one is worth real money later — which is why our free logbook comes in each authority's own layout.

Work out your own route

We keep a tracker for the common conversion routes — what each authority asks of a licence from each other authority, with links to the official pages so you can check every line of it yourself.

Open the licence conversion tracker. If your route is complicated, or you would rather have it researched and written out in order, we do that as a paid service.

Then pick the school

Once you know which country, the flight school finder lists what we hold there with contact details, and each country page names the authority, the licence ladder and the medical.

• Flight schools in United States of America — 314 listed
• Flight schools in Germany — 184 listed
• Flight schools in Argentina — 142 listed
• Flight schools in Brazil — 80 listed
• Flight schools in Australia — 64 listed
• Flight schools in Spain — 59 listed
• Flight schools in Canada — 58 listed
• Flight schools in Philippines — 56 listed

Conversion rules change, and they change without much warning. Treat everything here as the shape of the problem and your target authority as the only source that binds.