Hi,
To be honest, I don't know why everyone's so eager to train abroad.
I'm an IGRUA alumnus and yes, life wasn't as cushy as it could have have been if I was in the USA or Canada, but the one thing we were always, always assured of was the quality of training.
Ground class took 4 months. 4 months of studying what I would eventually see and do in the cockpit and it helped! and how! I cribbed and complained then and believed that the guys who chose to go abroad were wiser but I couldn't have been further from the truth! what I learnt then holds me in good stead now. I don't know of any flight school abroad, let alone in India, which conducts ground classes as well as IGRUA.
I read earlier about someone wondering as to where we'd land in case we had an engine failure, are you saying, say in the US, you'd always be withing gliding distance of a suitable aerodrome?
Flying training, atleast at IGRUA was very good. Yes, there were times where we didn't get to fly for a day, tops two, but we had an efficient flight management and rostering process in place and everyone who chose to fly, flew! The instructors took pains to teach us, as said earlier, also ended up hitting a few of us but that was all part of the game! It helped!
This post isn't intended to be an IGRUA vs. NFTI post, heck, for that matter, there were times when we, at IGRUA felt you guys at NFTI had it easy.
This is just to let everyone who's encouraging people to train abroad know that training in India isn't as bad, it saves you the trouble of conversion for starters and the standards are much much higher!