The best way to have made your instructors "give a crap" would have been to take a walk with your wallet elsewhere!
My own experience, with London Helicopter Centres at Redhill (they were Thurston Helis at the time and, no, I don't work for them...) couldn't have been more different from yours. I started my PPL(H) with a week off work and booked to fly two hours every day for that week. Each day, I turned up to find the instructor had already been there for about an hour and drawn up a board brief which we then took about an hour running through. And it wasn't just one particular instructor - my own instructor caught the 'flu on day two, so I flew with a few part-time guys over that first week. Each gave a similarly thorough and professional brief and each wrote comprehensive notes for the next guy to read up on my progress.
Making the prospective PPL(H) pay even more for their training is likely to price even more people out of the game, most of whom will scrimp and save in order to get airborne anyway. The best way for PPL(H) trainees, and any other helicopter trainee for that matter, to help raise and maintain standards is to find, by recommendation, companies and instructors who already uphold those high standards, and stick the finger up at those who don't as you hover taxi by...
My two penn'orth.
DBChopper
