Ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, and once you weed out the “celebrity” careers like Premiership footballer or pop star, and all the (sadly) unfeasible careers like pirate or ninja, you’ll quite probably find that the top answer you get will be pilot.

And who hasn’t at some point idly thought about how fantastic it would be to have a job where you spend your time flying around the world, experiencing the thrill of being in control of an enormous jet as you do so? The thing is, for many of us these thoughts that are dismissed at one point or another by a belief that it’d all be an impossible dream.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. While it’s by no means the easiest line of work to get into, there are opportunities for those who have got the dedication and perseverance to don the uniform of a pilot and take control of a commercial airliner. Like most other careers, becoming a pilot simply requires you to follow the training and experience pathway that all people in the profession must follow, and so if you break that journey down into phases it seems a whole lot easier.

Let’s start with the educational side of things. You don’t need to have a degree to become a commercial pilot, although some higher-education institutions offer diplomas or degrees in aviation-related studies, which are designed to give people specialist expertise in the overall industry rather than specifically as training to be a commercial pilot.

However, even though you don’t have to have a degree, what you certainly will need is a good understanding of mathematics and physics, the two disciplines that are essential for understanding the science of flight and therefore play a fundamentally important part in the process of pilot training. So make sure you keep paying attention in school!

The golden ticket to working as a pilot for a commercial airline is something called an Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL). It’s only with this that you are allowed to take command of a plane operating airlines’ scheduled flights. However, you don’t just start qualifying from scratch for the ATPL. Before then you need to get at least a couple of other pilot’s licences first. The first of these is a private pilot’s licence. This is the entry-level licence, and working towards qualifying for it will let you gain the basics of flying, with your practice taking place in small aircraft. After this comes a commercial pilot’s licence, which constitutes a big step up in terms of the complexity of the planes you’ll fly and your knowledge of crucially important areas such as meteorology and aviation law.

Only after you have the commercial pilot’s licence can you progress on to the ATPL, and even getting to this stage involves hundreds of hours of flight time and dozens of exams. In other words, this isn’t a career that you casually go into.

Training for these licences is also very expensive, with it potentially costing close to £100,000 pounds to complete the training required for the ATPL. It’s for this reason that many people complete this licence on a part-time basis, preferably using their commercial pilot licence as employment to help fund their training.

If we add on top of this the fact that after a while the working routine of continually being away from your family and continually existing on a very unsettled body clock can become draining after a while, then it’s easy that there are downsides to following this career path. That said, if your love of the idea of this type of work hasn’t been dampened by these challenges, then you’ve got nothing left to do other than book your first flying lesson!