How long do those in the know reckon !??

[mad_jock]

My tuppence worth

My background

Mech Eng degree
Scuba diving instructor.

Did phase 1 with oxford started Jan sat the exams in May while working full time.

The engineering degree meant most of it was revision. And performance etc was obvious once you got your head round the concepts.

The only swine was operational procedures, I was working abroad so didn't want to hang around for 2 days waiting for HPL and comms. Proberly spent more time revising that one than anything else.

The only problem I found was the hours log you are meant to keep. The fact that I had already done AC/DC electrics at school and then at Uni dosn't seem to matter. In fact a bigger problem was trying to dumb down to the knowledge taught in the world of JAR.

Phase 2 I did when I got back from europe 3 weeks studying full time then the 2 week brush up. The diving pretty well dealt with the HPL apart from the brain stuff. The Engineering helped with the Radio Nav. Comms papers are a joke and I don't know why they bother. There was only 2 question different between the 2 papers. Met I found one of the most interesting subjects out of the lot.

The 2 that gave me grief were the Gen Nav which was the only one I failed out of the 14 by 1 % (and I still don't think I know any more on the subject between when I failed it and passed it)
And airlaw which I would have quite happly failed the rest as long as I didn't need to do that exam again. Thankfully Oxfords feedback did the job. And as the instructors told us the only bit I use day to day is the stuff I learned for PPL. Still waiting for some tosser to jump out and ask me which annex facilitation is.

So with a hefty amount of background knowlege before you start it is possible to get them all out of the way in 3 months. If it was all fresh to me I would have taken alot longer.

I was adding the time up for my training going the modular route

3 weeks PPL
4 weeks hour building
12 weeks ATPL study
14 weeks CPL/IR/FI
2 weeks exams

I spread it over 18 months with 3 of them deciding if I should go for it or not and another one waiting for the class 1 medical app. The above numbers although look good I wouldn't like to have done it all back to back. I think a trip to the mental hospital would have been the likely outcome.

MJ