This post is also in Professional Pilot Training. I apologise if that's not allowed but the two threads seem to run together. The Great Powers will of course delete as they see fit.
It's too long since I trained at Van Nuys for specific comment to be fair about US flight training.
Something is afoot with flight training in South Africa and I can't quite put my finger on it.
It seems to me as though training schools are being pushed into a corner either by the CAA, whose old style hands on approach to training seems to have gone, or by the airports from which they operate. It's almost as though training establishments are not wanted and has their client base changed completely? What has happened to Private Pilot Licence Training as opposed to training for the Commercial Licence? Is private licence training for its own sake a dead fly? Schools seem to have a preponderance of commercially orientated pupils from the east across the waters or up country across the deserts. If South African schools have become training centres for foreign students that may well be in part because certain foreigners find it difficult to obtain Visas for the USA these days. That's probably bread and butter for the local schools but do I detect or imagine a change of attitude among instructors that indicates that training is now not so much a vocation as a turkey farm? That's understandable if the first set of circumstances which I spoke about is correct but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that there is a great danger here for a gradual and involuntary erosion of attitudes as well as standards. Flight training was always a stepping stone of course but I don't suppose it's helped outlooks that thanks primarily to economics the progression across that stony path has been slow. Then too there is the quality of ATC at certain airfields. Dangerous situations due to inexperience or lack of ATC training cannot always be explained away by calling them character building or whatever excuse one wants to dredge up for inefficiency.
If I were starting out with a bundle of bucks and an acceptable passport, I think I would very seriously consider going to the USA for my training. I think the experience of training from of a relatively busy US airfield with its functioning instrument systems, weather considerations and infrastructure would be of such value to the aspiring South African commercial pilot as to be worth considering. The fact that attitudes at American airfields might be utterly commercial is no longer of any disadvantage whatsoever to the student pilot at whatever stage of his training he may be.