Regardless of instructor quality, there is a limit to what can be taught, in 45 hours, to the
average PPL intake, aged around 45 and often a business/professional but not the young cream of the cream of the Royal Air Force, selected by kicking out some 90%+ of already carefully selected candidates.
The UK average is around 60 hours, depending on who you ask. I took 66 hours, which included walking out of one school at 20hrs that was operating really obviously crap maintenance practices (an AOC holder too).
It would be easy enough to turn out pilots capable of getting out their laptop and straight off planning a trip right across the UK, or UK to Greece or Spain or whatever. And then jumping into a plane and doing it. This is what a PPL holder should be able to do - it is 100.000% within his privileges.
Why can't he do it?
Well he could but the PPL course would be 100hrs. It would involve a lot of cross country, no great need to bang tons of circuits because you would be landing in different places, no great need to go solo at all actually because by the time you got the PPL you would be able to fly with your eyes shut, would be enormous fun, and would cost £20,000.
One would also need slightly better quality planes in which to do these trips, than the UK school average. Result: a £25,000 PPL.
Any takers?
I know there are many poor instructors but I think this debate is a bit like the fashionable one about "worsening" adult literacy. The evidence, such as there is, is that a higher % of young adults can read and write than say 50 years ago. What has changed is that while a lot of those who could not read were doing jobs where it didn't matter, a lot of those jobs are gone and these people are now ending up in positions where they get exposed to stuff like email, and their incompetence shows them up to ridicule.
Same with PPL training. All those years ago, there was little or no CAS, no notams, nobody cared what you did. You could fly into clouds. Many got killed but that was OK - hey, this is a risky hobby.
What is the latest on those American experiments where they took an ab initio student to a PPL/IR in about 50-60hrs TT, using purely scenario-based training, with no solo time at all? It doesn't suprise me this works because so much of what a pilot needs to know is detailed operational stuff. To learn to just fly isn't hard, especially if you do it in a low pressure learning environment (few if any circuits, plenty of enroute time).