JohnR81 - I'm sure your proposals would be beneficial, however on the exam contents thing, CAA exams have been full of pointless rubbish for as long as I can remember (which is quite a long time!) and so whilst I agree there is huge room for improvement, I can't see it happening any time soon. Ultimately we need people to recognise new hazards that they have never encountered before rather than just learning a list of what could go wrong, and that is pretty hard to train and assess by computer. You also have to bear in mind that the CAA has to be compliant with EASA, who have to be compliant with ICAO on licensing matters so it is hard to ditch stuff, quite easy to add stuff but then you create too many hurdles and disincentives and ultimately achieve flight safety only because it becomes too difficult for anyone to get a licence.