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Old 21st Dec 2010, 15:11
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Rithalic
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Ireland
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Hi Ved,

I've just finished my CPL, ME/IR at FTE in Jerez. Started flying in April this year and the weather for the most part has been pretty ok. During the summer obviously you will be sweating buckets and that can get rather unpleasent but at least it's usually clear and sunny. The winds do however have a tendancy to be a bit unpredictable but it's good experience. The winter was quite interesting with a fair amount of TS and CB's every now and then but spent the majority of it on instruments getting the IR sorted so again that wasnt too much of a problem.

The biggest difficulty you might face is dealing with the Spanish ATC, we continually suffered with IFR restrictions, i.e. only allowing one training flight up at a time, refusing to allow instrument approachs into seville for whatever reason they decided at the time and the ongoing possibility of more strikes. Oh and not to mention deciding to calibrate the ILS and resurface the runway all during our IRST week, which meant even further delays, all of which made life a tad stressful but hey, good banter! However, most of the time they're ok once you are airbourne, you just have to be 110% on your RT and get from them exactly what you want, sometimes having to be quite bulshy about it.

So yeah if you are dead set on spain then I would highly recommend FTE, absolutely great bunch of instructors and operations staff, well maintained fleet of aircraft, the students there are for the most part ok, few exceptions of course and most importantly the bar is pretty cheap too. Oh and I have every now and then read on here that people seem to think that priority is given to the integrated students over the modular guys, I can tell you now that this is completely untrue. Everyone is treated very much the same and whichever way you go about your training the school will get you up to your skills tests with a very good chance of passing it first time.

PM me if you need any further info,
Good luck.
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