nickp,
I can't weigh the value of the two similar courses in the two different shores of the Atlantic, except to note that the typical flight school in the states takes about 35 to 50 hours when the course is done as a continuoum.
Many students in the states are trained in a flying club, or at an FBO in a less formal course, so they tend to treat the excercise as a once a week thing, stretched over as much as two years. This causes lost training effect and thus the longer average student takes much longer to complete the course. The cost for a club PPL is quite a bit lower than at an FBO, as well.
A while back, we bashed around the relative excellence of pilots from each system, and it is a very subjective evaluation at best.
I cruised the web sites to see what we might glean from the data relative to the popularity of flying in each country.
see:
http://api.hq.faa.gov/clientfiles/CONTENT.htm
and:
http://www.caa.co.uk/sitemap/sitemap.asp
For example, in year 2000, there were 217,000 airplanes registered in the US to General Aviation owners (149,000 single engine piston alone!) They flew 30,900,000 hours in 2002. There were 93,000 student pilots, 251,000 private pilots that year. The total of all types of certified pilots was 625,583 for 275 million population (2274 pilots per million). There are 789 aircraft per million population.
In the UK that year there were 31,885 total private pilots of all types, and 16,500 commercial and ATP's. Total was 48,385 for 59.1 million population (813 pilots per million). There were 16,000 currently registered aircraft in the UK in 2001. That is
270 aircraft per million population.
So, based on population, the US has 2.79 times the number of pilots and 2.9 times the number of aircraft. I do believe that economics are the biggest difference between the two sets of numbers.
Can you tell me again what we in the US are doing wrong?