The Odd One
Our airfield now has resident 13, count them, 13 of these Cirrus things. They weren't there 2 years ago. I understand prices start at £250k a pop, that's £3.25 million more investment on the airfield in 2 years. There's now a whole training setup just to cater for them. I don't know if the people keeping all these Cirri going have been lost to the existing schools or whether they were privateers who have changed to the new type. The pilots are I believe all post-PPL types (I don't know if anyone anywhere is offering ab initio training on a Cirrus).
My point is that you can generate additional demand if the product is right.
I have been saying more or less exactly the above on pprune for the several years I've been here, and sure as clockwork I have been jumped on by traditional rag and tube / spamcan types who make up the bulk of UK GA and who treat the suggestion of "going after the money" as elitist crap which they presumably fear will price them off their airfield. I've had these fears voiced to me in person at a few places, too, when e.g. the airfield proposed to add an ILS.
There is no doubt in my mind that setting up a slick PPL/IR training & club operation which trains people to fly from A to B for real (that is, right across Europe - what else is one going to be doing in an SR22??), while paying only the barest legally required lip service to the WW1 UK PPL syllabus with its stupid circular slide rule and map+compass+stopwatch navigation, is the way ahead. Obviously such a "PPL" would be a bit more than the usual £8k
You would be converting people to the 150kt complex type before the skills test.
And it's the only way ahead that's left today. (Apart from a specialised aerobatic school, perhaps.)
Now, what sort of instructors would one need for such a school? No hour builder with a fATPL would be any good - they fall short on experience on type (zero), time on real IFR routes (zero), European IFR flight planning experience (zero). You would need ex airline pilots with GA IFR experience. Or keen private IR pilots but most of them are on N-reg and you would not get most of them to squeeze the JAA CPL/IR in between their business interests to enable them to legally instruct.
You would also need an accessible IR, with a short US-style ground school because the N-reg option is not really viable in the training/club context even if it does continue indefinitely.
There is work being done in the USA on an integrated one-step PPL/IR and the results look promising.