That is easy. Because 700 hours was the minimum requirement for any
non-approved course of training. Think of it as the modern day
modular. The approval granted to the few schools licensed to run such "approved" courses of training for those abridged courses, required that they were restricted, selective and full time
integrated. Successful completion of such an approved course allowed the licence to be issued to a graduate with around 200+ hours of flight time.
Hamble was the in-house training school for BEA/BOAC etc. until it was closed and the requirement contracted out. However there were others. Oxford, AST Perth, their successors in title, and later other new market entrants. Airlines such as Britannia (the forerunner of Thomsons) and a few others, also ran cadet programmes that utilised low hour "approved" cadets. It was always a very small section of the overall recruitment market (outside of BEA/BOAC). The majority of wider recruitment was split between military career changers and what were then termed "self improvers" the later being applicants that had worked their way up through the 700 hour requirements and often through a host of "stepping stone" jobs in order to get to the first tier airline market. It was never an easy passage, but the restricted numbers, natural attrition, and more plentiful supply (by ratio) of
aerial work type jobs, meant that it was a far more realistic proposition than is often the case today.
A thread from over 11 years ago!