Originally Posted by
rudestuff
Not exactly. You'd save £925 PLUS the cost of an extra 25 hours of hour building, which could be £2500-£5000. (The cost of landings would cancel out.) £3425-£5925 Should easily pay for most if not all an MEIR upgrade....
I agree that it's better to train in the SIM. But only if the training is appropriate. You won't be learning anything new after the first 10 hours, and my experience was that most of my 30 hours of sim time was spent flying full practice profiles which would have been the same price in the real aircraft AND loggable towards the CPL. Now my advice is generally to use the SIM as little as possible (unless you can get free practice time). The higher the SIM costs the higher the break even point and it may be cheaper to train in the aircraft even if it takes you 50 or 60 hours, and let's be honest here - IR flying is easy. I've never heard of anyone going over minimums.
If you're good at IR flying it might be "easy", but plenty of people struggle and would take more than 10 hours to cover the basics. After 10 hours I hadn't covered the basics - and I did a full IR not the reduced CBIR. So I had to start from the beginning and there's no way I could have covered all the elements of the IR course in 10 hours. Also I think I'd rather use the sim and practice all the different approaches easily, rather than the situation a lot of students are facing now where they have to transit for over an hour (in some cases 2...) just to find an approach that's available. Ultimately you've got to choose what you think is the right way for you - I'd rather use the sim, get to test standard (and hopefully above) and finish in minimum hours (if possible) and hour build, than fly 50 - 60 hours paying for an IRI and flying in a straight line in a cloud achieving less. Plus I'd rather stick to the same avionics and aircraft than keep chopping and changing between steam/glass/whatever. Personally, consistency and familiarity are more important than saving money - flying training is never going to be cheap however you do it.