Hi guys,
All I can say is this thread is priceless. The idea that somehow the Poms have a monopoly on world standards because their exams are less "accessible" for a variety of reasons, especially in terms of cost and time involved, is clearly ridiculous. But hey, whatever cranks your tractor...
Unfortunately, the British (or should that be the English) have an unfortunate reputation for being somewhat pompous and stuffy when it comes to things such as "standards". Whilst there may be an element of truth to this, I'm sure the majority of operators there are not actually like that. Auto appears to not to be one of them and so creates the illusion that all those working in the UK subscribe to his conservative viewpoints (to which he is entirely within his rights to air publicly).
I am in the interesting situation in that I work for a British organisation but live and work in Australia. As such, we are required to travel to the UK once every two years for recurrency training and all our AS332L command upgrades are done in the UK to their "exacting" standards. My take on the whole thing from my time in the UK with work is:
1. The standards there are very high but no higher than those in Australia or indeed the US (we send our S76 people to Florida for their respective ongoing training and upgrades).
2. The operators I have dealt with (face to face) all appeared to be reasonable people who didn't profess to have a monopoly on world standards.
3. Operators in the UK think the JAA system is unecessarily complex, expensive etc.
4. They all want to live and work in Australia but be on UK wages.
Ah, there's the rub. With all the costs of getting qualified in the UK, just about the only place you could repay all your loans would be as an offshore pilot on the North Sea. I would imagine this would be a big turn off for UK trained aircrew to work elsewhere. Are they pricing themselves out of other markets with the exorbitant costs of training in the UK?
Perhaps then, Auto has a point in that only so many people will go to the trouble and expense of jumping through all the hoops in order to work in the UK, in the hope that it will eventually pay off. For the rest of us, I'm not sure why we'd bother, much less be concerned about it. It's a big world out there and the UK is only a very small part of it.
P68
(half Aussie/half Pom but no Wop, Seppo, Frog etc)