So is everyone of the opinion it's NOT worth starting one now? I was going to take the written exam next week and then follow up with the flying test some 12 months later. That way I'd get my IMCr until 2014?
I don't think anybody knows, and if the CAA has a strategy (which it probably does) it is keeping its powder dry till the last minute.
There are multiple ways of looking at this, and they depend on what sort of flying you do, you plan to do, how much value you attach to a given capability (legal or otherwise) and how much time you can allocate to collecting extra privileges. A lot of it hangs on the chances of becoming an outright owner, or a member of a syndicate around something capable.
Much has been written already...
If I was now where I was in early 2002, just finished my PPL and about to finish the IMCR,
I would get on with it because (excluse me for being blunt
) a PPL without instrument privileges is as good as a chocolate teapot.
If you cannot fly on instruments you cannot even fly to the UK/JAA VFR privileges i.e. 3km vis. You cannot even pop over to Le Touquet on a typical summer hazy day because there is no horizon. You probably also cannot radio navigate (GPS/VOR/DME) so getting anywhere past the nearest cowshed is a major navigational undertaking, worthy of membership of the Royal Institute of Navigation (and you get the free sock full of sand to stuff down your
trousers).
Legally, the IMCR allows you to plan a flight in reasonable wx, with the backup of being able to file an ILS airport as the main, or just the alternate.
I can hardly think of a better example than this week's wx - haze and more haze.
Even if nothing new happens, and we get the status quo, you will have the IMCR, and you will then have to re-do the 50hrs to do the JAA IR.
But we might get the CBM IR for which the IMCR training will count as a credit - not that anybody will pass the CAA IRT without some considerable training (I took > 20hrs).
You can knock off the IMCR this summer.