Hi,
I'm not a big poster on this site but I think my comment might be useful to other people still hesitating between the full JAA course or the FAA-followed-by-the-conversion way. I hope it will help people avoid the mistake I made.
I just passed on friday the JAA ME IR skills test at Bournemouth. It took me 40.3 hours (+ 1.9 for the test) to do so. I already held a FAA SE IR that I did last year in October in San Diego. (I don't have a FAA CPL).
The minimum number of hours for this course is 20 hours: 13 in the sim, 7 in the airplane but I was told right away to plan for at least 30 hours.
I ended up doing 19.3 hours in the sim and 21 hours in the plane.
I'm certainly not the best pilot in the world, I take maybe a bit longer than other people to learn, and most importantly I lack of self-confidence, but don't get me wrong, it's absolutely impossible to get the rating in 20 hours if you don't have a lot of experience ( I now have exactly 250 hours total time not counting sim).
The two environment are very different and the things I found the most difficult were:
- the NDBs (holds and procedures). I had never really flown NDB before (the US have decomissionned almost all of them) and I'd been told it was hard but I didn't imagine it was that hard. I had also never heard about gates and abeams in the FAA environment.
- The Comms. Much more standard and strict than in the US. More calls, for exemple "Final Approach track or Localizer Established", "Next time over the beacon, ready for the procedure", I always forgot these as I was twisting, turning and throttling at the same time. It took me a bit of time to remember to do them but that's also because I sometimes had my brain switched off.
- The airspace. Down where I trained in Southern California I can't remember ever going in uncontrolled airspace so hearing about "stopping points" and "remain outside controlled airspace" was strange.
- ME. The fact that it was a multi-engine obviously doesn't help as there are lot more crucial checks to do and therefore a higher workload. The rudder was sometimes hard to control as there was a guy behind the aircraft hanging to it and it was me.
So in one word, if you think that the conversion way is going to save you some money, well in my case, the answer is negative and I reckon it's the same for most of us.
I must add that I had only flown about 20 hours in the UK before starting the IR so a person that did their PPL in the UK might be more used to and understand better the UK airspace and comms. 14 of these 20 hours were for the CPL course which I interrupted after 6 weeks because of the weather. Somebody that already has his CPL before doing the IR will have more hours on the ME and there might need less hours. Well it's generally the case at PAT as most people do everything on ME.
I must also say that most people who were converting and whom I talked to took about the same number of hours (35-40) and a friend of mine took about 60 hours not being full time and having to "juggle" between his job, the weather and the week-ends.
If I had to do all my training again I would probably avoid the US for the PPL and the IR and would only do the hour building as it is really fantastic to fly out there. Training there knowing that you gonna convert to JAA licence later is another story.
Any comment or question, don't hesitate. If you did the same as me I'd be interested to know how many hours it took for you to convert it.