Boeing,
I have never heard of it either! I completed my JAA PPL with UKFT about 2.5 years ago and found them very good, odd grumbling point but there again all schools will have. They have just teamed up with another FTO (Rainbow Air), thereby expanding their fleet of aircraft to quite an impressive size. I have hired privately from Rainbow and have been very impressed with availiability and quality of aircraft for hire.
I dont subscribe to the 'fly in UK, learn in UK' arugument. Myself and others I have known have learnt with UKFT and had no problems back home. I went to bouth Bournemouth and White Waltham on my return for check flights to hire aircraft and both signed me off after 1 hour. Maybe MJRs both came from the same school as each other and instruction wasnt as good but UKFT is pretty fair and they WILL fail you if they dont think you are upto standard.
You may need an hour or two to get used to the different radio procedures than the US but this is no great problem - the aircraft still flies the same way over here and despite popular opinion there is crap weather in CA (during my IR rating we used to go looking for it to get actual IR time!).
Longbeach Airport is very busy as well so you will come back having learnt in a busy area. It is full tower facailities, 5 active runways and military as well as commercial jet operations, bit daunting at first but after about 5 hours you just drop into it and it becomes good fun sharing the runway with the big boys!
During your training you will also get the chance to fly into places such as Catalina Island (once you see this place you will know what I mean about interesting landing!) and Big Bear ski resort.
You will save money as well. I have two lots of flights over there, a months hotel accomdation (very nice hotel!) and 62 hours flying/instruction and not forgettiing food and beermoney and the whole lot cost me about £4500 - plus I had a bloody good holiday out of it!
One piece of advice I will give it to getyour written exams out of the way before you go over there - that way you just have to concentrate on the flying once you get there. When I did mine the only exam I had to sit out there was the RT as the guy I used for the writtens was not signed off to conduct the RT.
If you have any specific questions about UKFT (or Rainbow) then feel free to private email me and I will try and answer.
Julian.
Last edited by Julian; 4th September 2002 at 10:27.