Originally Posted by IO540
I am not suggesting the rules are tightened; they are already ridiculously tight for an activity which has so little potential for 3rd party damage (and the State has exactly zero business dictating what personal risk an individual takes on). But training should be made more honest, rather than just taking £8000 from every punter walking through the door, then giving him a piece of paper, patronisingly telling him "a license is a license to learn, young man" (followed by half a dozen of the other stupid and useless smart-ar*e phrases that litter this activity) and bugge*ing off with the next student...
very true. I was very lucky to have a fine simulator instructor who used the 5 hours imc training in the ppl syllabus to teach me a "mini ifr", which included everything from general aircraft handling, ndb and vor tracking to a basic ils appraoch, all in full imc. And another instructor took me twice in minimum vrf conditions (1.5km vis in airspace G with barely earth sight), demonstrating what i'm actually allowed to fly in once i have my license. That certainly helped me alot when i got trapped above an overcast cloud layer (due to unforcasted weather and a bit of poor planning...) and had to descent through 6000ft of solid clouds circumnavigating embedded cb cells with a stormscope... all in "vrf" with about 30h experience after i got my license. Not a nice experience and i never want be in that situation again, i think however that the proper training i recieved during the ppl helped a alot to save my day.