I think the proposed FAA to EASA IR conversion is actually pretty good (one exam and an IRT, no mandatory training),
Where is the reference to the 1 exam? I have seen the LOs (the syllabus) but
AFAIK nobody has actually stated how many exam sittings which will translate into, and crucially whether there will be a QB. Absence of a QB dramatically jacks up the workload.
Nobody will pass the IRT - not even a 20k hour airline pilot, and probably
especially not a 20k hr airline pilot, without a good number of hours with an instructor familiar with the requirements.
That's why I think the "no mandatory training" part is essentially worthless, while being politically highly provocative (to the FTO industry) and this probably led to:
the problem is the silly requirement for 100hrs PIC Instrument Flight Time. Which unless studying the inside of clouds is your hobby takes 500hrs of IFR...
A lot more than 500hrs IFR. More like 1000-2000hrs IFR, for anybody flying IFR "normally" (i.e. in VMC at high altitude) and not merely flying "VFR" in IMC at low levels to avoid route charges in a plane which is over 2T. Which one might think twice about logging in certain countries which prohibit IFR OCAS
I actually wonder what the point of this conversion option is at all. If one pretends one doesn't have any ICAO IR and just does the CBM IR as ab initio (which one is obviously entitled to do) then the min dual training is 10hrs (which I am 99.9% certain will be required by 99.9% of candidates no matter how experienced), with 40hrs instrument time (which
can include non-PIC time), so the extra cost is whatever the TK comes out to relative to the "1 exam". Is that correct?
If so, I cannot see what benefit the FTO industry is going to get by killing off the conversion route by demanding the ludicrous 100hrs PIC instrument time. The only extra workload for the student will be the extra TK and the FTOs don't make any
extra money from that; the UK ones will still charge ~£1000 to take some homework off you and sign you off for the exams.
Hodja - the gotcha here is not that it is not IFR time (which is easy to log) but that the 100hrs instrument time has to be as PIC i.e. not under training. Most pilots flying normally accumulate very little instrument time because nobody deliberately sits in cloud, turbulence, icing, etc.
Actually I wonder about what "PIC" exactly means. For example if you do an IR in the FAA system, you log the lot as PIC because the actual flying is VFR, under the hood. Only the 250nm x/c flight is traditionally flown on an IFR FP, and only flights above 18000ft will have to be IFR in which case you cannot be PIC. It is only in the JAA system that training is implicitly PU/T. So I reckon an FAA IR holders' training will count towards the 100hrs. Not that that helps much...