Post by NoSpamA final thought - some US schools used to guarantee a "pass" for a fixed
fee (and may still do so) but just ask yourself how that can be possible
and whether they're likely to use an independent examiner in that
situation. I've seen the end result of the "guaranteed pass" schools -
people frequently need more training (when they get home) before they're
at a safe standard. Beware.
I've never heard of a "guaranteed pass". Rest assured that you will
fail a US checkride if you are not up to standard. They can guarantee
a pass like a driving school can - everybody will pass eventually.
Learning in the USA is very different to learning in the UK. Take the
typical case of a UK student going over there, versus his/her doing it
here:
1) time allocation
US: get your head down and fly solidly for a few weeks - rapid
learning
UK: fit it in between loads of distractions, family/business, hassles,
etc, over 1 year or more. If a UK student parked up in a caravan next
to the school (having picked a period of super weather first,
somehow...) and lived and slept flying, he'd get his PPL done in 4
weeks too, but almost nobody does this here.
2) money
US: you already have the budget sorted, otherwise you would not be
going there! Anyway, you won't get the US visa if you even look a bit
skint.
UK: you probably don't have the budget sorted up front; IME many PPL
students have just enough for the next 1 or 2 lessons and then they
have to stop and save up some more. With few exceptions, the UK scene
is skint.
3) age
US: Britons going to the USA tend (from what I saw over there) be in
the 20-40 age range
UK: Average PPL student age is a good 45-50 (some CAA figures on their
website) and many are a lot older than that.
This is important because the older you are the longer it takes to
learn (I took 66hrs at age 43 and that was about average at that
school) and also the older people tend to be business/professional
types who simply do not tolerate the rather more "quirky
personalities" one finds around many schools, and this doesn't help
the learning rate...
4) weather
US: weather is either very good (Arizona/SoCal) or fairly predictable
(Florida)
UK: weather is usually poor; occassionally you get lucky but it's no
good if you run out of money after a week of solid training! My PPL
took 1 year and there was a 90 day period when I booked every day to
fly and got just 3 flights in.
5) organisation
US: schools have high utilisation and are organised to avoid downtime
- where I did my IR they had near-24-hour servicing, a bowser went
round all parked aircraft during the night, topping them off with
fuel, so everything was ready to roll at 8am
UK: airplanes go "tech" regularly and then somebody goes off to sort
out where to get it fixed, on the cheap if possible
6) instructor quality
This is going to be ultra controversial here! But, *IME*, the UK scene
is mostly ATPL hour builders, whereas in the USA there are more long
term instructors. They do have hour builders out there too but the
ones I met were much more professional than ones I met here in the UK.
This can at best be a generalisation but overall it will make a
difference to the figures.
I have never seen data on how long it took to get a PPL say 50 years
ago, but it was a different world then:
1) different attitude to risk - there was a "can do" attitude, and
accidents were an accepted risk. Incidentally I don't think the WW2
fighter pilot going solo in 15hrs is a useful analogy because these
were young men, the best around, and a far cry from the people doing a
PPL today who are on average about 3x older. Some of today's students
are ready to go solo in say 5 hours, too.
2) virtually no controlled airspace, so navigation wasn't an issue BUT
the methods used then are still taught today as the primary method, so
it's not suprising it doesn't hack it.
3) many more airfields - look how many ex airfields there are in say
Sussex/Hants - they were all over the place then. Now there are just a
few where you can just turn up. So there were more options for a
landing if something was not going right - plenty of stories about WW2
fighter pilots getting lost and flying around the s. east UK until
they found an airfield; you couldn't do that today.
4) different audience - decades ago, flying was done as an exciting
sport by wealthy ambitious and determined young men; occassionally
women. Today, these types are doing something else, and the training
scene consists mostly of keen but barely solvent people, which is fine
but you can't expect them to progress as fast when they are constantly
strapped for cash and/or time.
5) much less theoretical knowledge. Even the CAA IR was far easier
20-30 years ago compared to today's 2-3 feet of paper in the ATPL
ground school. I know enough people who did their IR back then. The
PPL has no mandatory ground school element but the exams have to be
passed somehow, which takes yet more time.
One final point: the cost of doing a PPL is not a lot compared to the
ongoing cost of flying, so if exceeding say a £5k budget is a problem
right now, the person won't be flying much afterwards.