Most of the NPPLs I know are experienced PPLs, who chose to downgrade their medical, on cost grounds.
I'm one of those - mostly, apart from a few minor problems, now past, and I'm also the original poster.
An extra 13 hours adds just over 40% extra experience - and in my book that is a hell of a lot more potential to learn airmanship skills which are invaluable.
There's no substitute for experience, no-one can deny that - so I'd like to propose a new licence type for new PPLs, called the Super-JAA. You need 70 hours total, with 15 solo and a Class A medical. That sounds good, and gets in lots of useful extra hours before you can go off on your own.
Any takers?
I thought not.
Yes, extra hours are good experience, but where do you stop on safety issues? Should we all fly in cotton wool balls? Someone out there decided that 32 hours was a good enough minimum, though I rather expect that most do a few more. There should be enough statistics in now to see whether the lower number of hours kills people or not.
And at the end of the course, what are the difference in priviledges? As a fair weather PPL myself, the only lack I've felt is not automatically being able to fly abroad, which was where I started this thread. I didn't do very much in the way of trips abroad when I had the UK PPL anyway (which actually I still have, though lapsed) so it wasn't a big deal not being able to go, just stupid bureaucracy. In return, my NPPL means no yearly medical, and no silly "twelve hours in the second of two years" (who on earth thought that one up?). I didn't know that the NPPL course doesn't have radio nav. Neither did my UK PPL course.
B