Have to say agree with EA and the rest on this one! The cost of progressing beyong the PPL and actually starting to improve yourself is prohibitively expensive.
/Rant mode on
I paid $200/hr for my ME(IR) training in a turbo charged Seneca II including instructor - thats about £115/hr. I have spoken to a student of a well known school in middle England that people like to get on their CV who was being charged £400/hr dual !!!!
Another problem, as previously hinted at here, is that a lot of training aircraft look like they would collapse if you washed them and the FTO still wants £170/hr for you to hire them! If you are going to charge those sums of money at least present your client with a reasonble aircraft and not one that makes them want to say a few Hail Marys before they start her up. Nothing p1sses me off more than getting in a hire aircraft to find inop stickers over half the kit! Maybe they should deduct a proportional amount from the hire rate for all non-working kit
The fact that you can sit a PPL with an instructor and pay £30/hr for him/her and then all of a sudden you get in an aircraft with them for CPL and they suddenly charge £70/hr is mad!!! I paid the same rate throughout my training in the US $35/hr, that was ME, CPL(SE), CPL(ME) and IR(SE) and IR(ME), funny huh? - bet there are a few people here with clenched butt cheeks thinking of all the money that the US flight schools are missing out on
The example given of sitting 14 exams over a year not to mention having to take 2 wks out of work to attend ground school just to even start the IR training just goes to show what a complete joke our system is!!!!!
Anyone who has read 'The Killing Zone' would know that one section it deals with how the FAA looked at accident statistics and as a result reduced the requirements needed to commence the IR course - the result was that accidents statistics fell. As quite a few people on this board bleat on about how much worse our weather is than the US then you would think people would actually take this on board and do something about it here.
The more open the IR was to PPLs the safer our skys would be.
Not everyone who wants to take an IR wants to fly commercially, we should reduce the requirements to take an IR in both terms of exams required and cost. The flight training industry can recoup its costs by making people sit the exams for the CPL and charging a fortune per hour for that instead, after all fewer people would be inclined to take a CPL unless they were serious about becoming a pilot and the overall cost could remain the same.
/Rant mode off
Apart from that - nothing wrong with UK flight training
Julian