PEGGY MURPHY
You really must try to get your hatred for Colin Green under control. It is affecting your judgement. If you cannot achieve this, then you should try to ensure that your hate campain harms him and only him.
Over the past three years at least 5 schools have gone broke. These included PPSC, Four Forces, SFT, Pilot Assist and one in South Africa the name of which escapes me. Colin Green was involved in only one of these failures. I have no wish to defend SFT because I was not part of it and have no knowledge of the details. But I think that it is relevant that the World Trade Centre attack on 11 September 2001 was only one month before the failure of SFT. I suspect that this affected SFT in some small way.
Tubular Bells did not state the name of his school, but you have chosen to assume that it is EPTA. But the details provided by Tubular Bells in his initial post included the statement:
"The instructors are sub-standard (one instructor has only a PPL, 100 hours and ATPLs passed, but no CPL - please tell me if this is possible? )".
All of the EPTA groundschool instructors are highly experienced and very effective. None of them match the description of having a ppl and 100 hours.
I am the manager of the groundschool and instruct a number of subjects. Of the 5 groundschool instructors, one holds a full ATPL and several thousand hours of airline experience. Two are ex-RAF Navigators with many decades of experience in large aircraft. Another is an ex-Army helicopter pilot with several thousand hours experience. I am the only non-aircrew instructor and must depend upon many decades of experience as an Air Engineer Officer in the RN.
The quality of any groundschool is best assessed by looking at the results. EPTA results include the following:
a. The vast majority of EPTA students pass their exams first time. This is illustrated by our Module B results for the May exams. 7 self sponsored students each took 6 exams. Of the 42 exams taken, all but one was a first time pass. Subjects included PERF. M&B, Rad Nav, Flight Planning, HP&L and Ops Proc. The unlucky student who failed one exam got 73% in Flight Planning. The UAE students in the same class did not fare quite so well but still passed a large proportion of their exams. You may wish to consider how you would have fared had you been obliged to take your exams in arabic!!!!
b. Those students who fail to pass first time are given whatever free retraining is required to enable them to pass at future attempts. This may take the form of anything from a complete rerun of the relevant module to individual tuition.
c. No EPTA student has ever been required to pay any extra fees for whatever groundschool retraining he or she has received. You suggested in a previous post that this system indicated a lack of confidence in the quality of our training. It is in fact exactly the opposite. We are prepared to guarantee free retraining because we know that only a very small proportion of our students will ever require it. More importantly we believe that it is unfair to make students pay for retraining.
d. No EPTA student has ever run out of attemts or time (18 months) to pass his ATPL exams.
e. A considerable number of students from other schools come to EPTA for consolidation training having failed exams at their prevous schools. Every one of these students has gone on to pass all of their exams.
TUBULAR BELLS
You should certainly be concerned if instructors are simply reading from an OHP. This is in fact exactly what one SFT instructor did when teaching PPSC students following the failure of PPSC. EPTA do not employ any ex-SFT groundschool isntructors. I have however rejected 2 applications from such instructors in the past, quite simply because I did not consider them to be up to the required standard. Our most recent recruit came from ATA, which had an excellent reputation for the quality of its instructors.
I have been told that one of the schools in Florida employs an ex-student who "had previously had a lot of problems passing the groundschol,exams".
You should be less worried about the existence or otherwise of computer training devices. At the end of the day the quality of the training depends more on the instructor than on what tools he has available.
Finally, before signing up with any school you should always spend time talking with existing students. I always advise potential customers to do this when they visit EPTA. I do this becaue I am absolutely confident that they will be impressed with what they are told by our students.
Potential customers could of course listen to PEGGY MURPHY if they value the views of a person who has never studied at the EPTA groundschool.
Last edited by Keith.Williams.; 27th May 2004 at 18:42.