Good Discussion and some good points.
Like a lot of you, I am a European flying in the USA and would love the opportunity to come home and fly.
Noggin: You made some good points. The CAA used to have a waiver for pilots with 3000 hour heavy flying time. Does that still exist with the JAA? I heard of some sort of waiver for pilots with 4000 hours. Still trying to find out if there's any merit to it.
For someone that's flown with pilots on both sides of the pond my opinion is that one side doesn't produce a better final product than the other. But one thing for sure is there's a lot more BS and ego stroking involved in the Euro side. I suppose they need to do that in order to keep the supply of money coming in and keep themselves in a job.
It's going to be a lot of money, hard work, determination and a lot of jumping through hoops to get the JAA licence and then more work to get a job there. Sometimes it hard to justify if all the effort will be worth it. For some of us it may not be. It all comes down to how much are you willing to sacrafice in order to get it.