How to obtain a PPL in Europe, near Italy

@Inkognito very good point. If you are modular and have a silver star it saves you hour building (30hours?).

More importantly with airline application CVs being virtually identical, having gliding experience is a positive differentiator.

RobertL18C wrote:

having gliding experience is a positive differentiator

Inkognito wrote:

Any glider pilot will tell you that glider pilots are the better pilots…

Of course they are

Anyone contested that?

airline pilot is the end goal but if it’s easier to just get the ppl first and then go to do the atpl later rather than going from zero to atpl then I’ll do that.

It is not easier to “first get the PPL” if you want to become an airline pilot, it will be harder.

I personally would not recommend it but the truth is if you want to be an airline pilot then find an integrated flight training academy that is somehow associated with an airline (the closer, the better, but it is only half true anyway) and do the training there. For example the academies claiming to supply Lufthansa, Ryanair etc…with pilots.

It will be expensive and you will not really know much once you are done, but that’s all that’s needed to go on to the 320/737 type rating.

I would say that, if you want to be a commercial pilot, stay in Canada or go US, because you’ll have a better life in these countries: more jobs and better salary, in exchange of more hours needed to go atpl route (250 io 500) in Europe. There is competition for entering in the good companies (national airlines such as luftansa, air france, KLM, …) where you are at ~75 flight hours per month, good salaries and no fixed based. There are more FO seats but cheap salary, fixed base and more flight hours in the low cost (easy/ryanair/wizzair/vueling), in the 90h range, that is the legal max.

It’s still not clear to me where Steff will be based for his studies…
North of Italy is a very broad concept, it could be in Turin as it could be in Venice or Bologna or Bolzano: those places are far apart and knowing where makes a big difference in choosing where to learn to fly!

On the integrated training, some schools design their training as a full time thing, so making it compatible with university studies might be difficult, and logistically very difficult. Imagine being at university somewhere in northern Italy and having to go every day to Innsbruck for your training: it sounds pretty insane (and Maribor is probably even worse!), so it’s hard to give any advice without understanding exactly where you would be and how busy university will keep you.

A modular approach (PPL, MEP, CPL, IR, etc) is obviously more flexible and gives you the freedom to adjust training around your schedule. Maybe it will be more expensive, but it allows you to change school on the way if you don’t like it, adjust the pace to busy and less busy times, etc.

In other words, as always, the answer is “it depends” :)
There is no better or worse path, but there is a path that works better than the other for your situation (and location :)).