just remember ... its not all in the price ... dont get me wrong, i dont have a money tree at the bottom of my garden, and i begrudgingly paid those ILS approach fees for my IR ! infact, i still have a sizeable debt from my CPL/IR training.
i am not interested in promoting any one school in the UK, or slagging off the modular route etc but i think there are a couple of things people should seriously consider before parting with all that hard earned (or borrowed) money.
1)
quality of instruction, understanding exactly what the instructor is saying (especially in the a/c with props spinning) ... now ask yourself if the instructor doesnt speak english as their first language, no matter how good they be as instructors, are they gonna get their knowledge through to you clearly ? also, its fine if a foreign school saying it has english instructors, are you guaranteed to get that one, each time ? i am not only referring to schools in spain here.
2)
flight time vs sim time, from my experience, i felt as if i could have benefitted hugely from having more sim time and less actual aircraft time. some may find this strange, but the sim is a great tool for really maximising your "time in the air". especially when i got onto the seneca, it would take perhaps 15 mins to do an ILS from a go-around, and a little longer if you were going a procedural NDB .... ie. a lot time wasted going downwind, or being vectored away from inbound commercial traffic. dont get me wrong, i wouldnt want to do all my time in a sim (i know there is one school that just about does), but a good 20 hours in a sim would be great - dead easy to be repositioned on an 8 mile final in a split second.
3)
hidden costs, i am not referring to those extortionate
approach fees some airfields charge here ! but to the cost of getting to where ever you choose to do your training, accomodation, food, transport whilst there, the trips home for a weekend (CPL/IR is a long course consider 10 weeks as the norm), entertainment money if in a foreign country, not that you are going on the raz every night, but if you are there on weekends, what are you gonna do ?
i found my CPL/IR challenging, really challenging, but with hard work and dedication (and lots of sleep) you can get through it without having to retake any of the tests. some days one feels on top of the world, others, you ask yourself if you have made the right decision to become a pilot, and sometimes a weekend away from the school, instructors and aircraft is just what the doctor ordered !
you will be parting with a lot of money, just do your research properly, visit the school, country etc, meet the instructors who you are going to spend the next 10+ weeks with, speak to past students, they have a unique insight into any problems that you might experience. we are all different and require different types of schools and instruction, but i would advise against just going to the cheapest school, because in the long run, it may not be the cheapest !
hopefully there are a few points here to think about, and help you in making your decision, i just hope i havent come across too "touchy feely"
good luck with your decision
