Foghorn - I am not sure about the CAA figures. They seem far too low and I wonder about their definitions.
If you say OATS has 200 students, Cabair 150 & BAE 120 you bust their figures without touching the smaller schools.
Regardless it is a fact that a signigicant number of job seekers in the UK market have trained outside of the UK CAA remit. Both eaysJet and Ryanair were taking substantial courses of cadets coming from Holland and the Netherlands in recent years.
With something like 8 CAA examiners working full time on IRTs at the rate of 2 a day for only 140 days a year you are looking at over 2000 available IRT slots a year... Allowing for fails and partials the back of a fag packet calculations suggest there must be a lot more than <200 people taking IR's lately. Or else being a CAA examiner is a cushy number!
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