thejakes,
For the FAA as well as the JAA I just have to take the written test (which has forced be to brush up on US air law anyway, so that's a good thing; their airspace actually makes sense to me!) and take the checkride. For the cost of that checkride, I get an unrestricted FAA rather than restricted, and don't have to go through the adminstrative hoops to do the conversion. All that means is that I have to pay for the checkride . . . seems fair enough! I encourage you to get in touch with NAC and/or other schools to get the real lowdown, since I'm just paying attention to flying at the mo.
WX Man,
Just to explain, "what I expected" on the downsides was the kind of mildly negative stuff drawn from pprune style searches. I guess I could sum it up by saying that NAC feels like an efficiently run profit-making school, whereas my home base in the UK (South Warwickshire at Wellesbourne) feels like a not-for-profit club. (It's actually not quite as extreme as that, but I think you get the idea.) No comparisons to other US-based schools were meant to be made; I meant the expectations of US training in general! (If I had meant to compare US schools, then I would've used the word experience rather than expectation.)
But, since I don't have any experience of other US schools, feel free to lay in with gossip!! I quite enjoying reading the "Florida Flight School Battles" on pprune!!
As I said before, I plan to come back here again; but then again I also plan to go visit the school-that-shall-not-be-named as well, just for the variety!