TRAINING

How you get promoted, and what command costs

Rank is gated on hours you actually flew, command is a training course rather than a purchase, and command is held one aircraft type at a time.

2 August 2026UPDATED 6 August 20264 MIN

Promotion at SkyHub is deliberately slow in one direction and impossible in another: you cannot buy it, and you cannot skip it. Every hour that counts towards a rank is an hour a recorder watched you fly.

This is the ladder, all nine ranks of it, what the command course actually involves, and why a Captain can still be flying as a First Officer on Tuesday.

The ladder is hours, and hours are flown

Every rank is gated on recorded block hours, and the ladder below carries all nine gates — click a rank for what that step asks of you.

Those hours are not a counter that something adds to. They are summed from your accepted flight reports every time they are read, which is why there is no lever anywhere in the product that can set them. There is nothing to buy and nothing to award.

Only one of the nine is a course. Captain is trained for; every other rung is handed over when the hours are there and the upgrade fee is paid out of money you earned in the game. The fees climb with the ladder — nothing to pay for the first two, then 3,000 at First Officer up to 120,000 at DPE-2 — and none of them is ever sold for real money.

THE LADDERClick a rank to see what it takes.

Flown hours are the gate on every promotion — and only the gate. Command is trained rather than bought, and every fee on the ladder is paid out of money earned in the game; no rank, rating or hour is ever sold for real money. The three grades in gold are examiner ranks: still the ladder, but a different job rather than the next step after a command.

Above a command: the examiner grades

The ladder does not stop at Captain, and the three rungs above a line command are a different job rather than a bigger version of the same one. Line Training Captain at 280 hours is still line flying, with the training sectors of the pilots behind you on it. Flight Instructor at 420, then DPE-1 at 600 and DPE-2 at 850, are the examiner grades — the ranks the checking side of the airline is drawn from.

They are gated exactly the way every other rank is: recorded block hours, and an upgrade fee paid out of money earned in the game. There is no separate application, no seniority list and nobody to impress. The hours are the whole qualification.

They are drawn in gold on the ladder above rather than red for that reason. Still the same ladder, still the same gate — but a Captain who never wants to examine anybody has not stalled at rung five, and the page should not imply they have.

Command is a course, not a purchase

Reaching the hours for Captain makes you eligible. It does not make you a Captain. Command is a training programme you enlist on, free, and it runs in two halves:

Four line-training sectors, each of which has to score 90 or better.
Then the final check, which you pay for, and two check sectors at 95 or better.

Fail a sector and you are not thrown off the course. You pay a remedial fee and fly it again: 500 to repeat a line sector, 1,000 to repeat a check sector.

Every gate reads the overall score the SkyHub recorder produces, and only that. A sector logged from a summary with no telemetry behind it is flown and paid normally, but it can never advance the course, because there is nothing in it to grade.

Command is held per type

Flying is unrestricted. Any pilot may fly any type on any route on their sheet. Command is narrower: it is held per aircraft type, and it is what makes you the pilot in command and pays you at your own rank.

Fly a type you do not command and you operate as a First Officer for that sector, paid at the Senior First Officer rate, even if you are a Captain on something else. This is judged on the aeroplane that actually left the ground, not the one on the paperwork.

Below command rank nothing changes, because a Cadet through to a Senior First Officer is a First Officer on everything already.

Type ratings, and what they cover

A rating is held per family rather than per aircraft. One A320 rating flies the A319, the A320neo and the A321LR, so those sit in your fleet together at no extra cost. A type from a family you do not hold has to be bought, which is what stops an A320 pilot quietly adding a 737 to their sheet.

A rating is bought once and held for life. Drop the type from your fleet and add it back years later and there is nothing to pay, because the purchase is recorded against you and the family rather than against the slot.