Originally Posted by
rudestuff
However, what you end up doing is flying big VFR circles around Florida or Arizona and having loads of fun but getting very little quality training value from it. So my suggestion would be this:
If you're already paying for the plane, any extra instruction will only cost the price of the instructor, so spend 5 hours practicing and take your FAA PPL. Then fly for a while to get 50 hours cross country PIC. Make sure that every flight you do lands somewhere 50NM away. Fly at night if you can. Once you have 50 hours XC do your FAA IR - it'll only cost you the instructor rate for 20-40 hours. (In the US you need 40 hours under the hood, but only 20 of those need to be with an instructor, you can practice with a mate as safety pilot)
If you come back to the UK with an FAA PPL/IR and 170 hours, you can convert the IR in 15 hours (down from 45 hours), then do a 15 hour CPL course (down from 25 hours. If you play your cards right, you could have everything with 200 hours.
Effectively you'll be getting your EASA IR for free if you spend $2000 extra in the US.
Basically, you need to future proof yourself: think what you might need in the future and get it now while it's free. Imagine you get a job as an FO and a few years down the line you get offered command - but you can't upgrade because you only have 65 hours night and you need 100 hours night for an ATPL. You'll have to go hour building all over again. An hour in the logbook is good, but an hour IFR cross country at night is a lot more valuable.
Wish it was as easy as you make it sound like.
First of all - you need a visa for this, so you have to go through a Part 141 school.
Second, you still have to meet all the prerequisites for FAA PPL, it's not just "5 hours dual", you need the night dual, instrument, X/C dual etc.
Third, it's much more expensive than you say, $400-600 per exam for the DPE alone so around $1k in just DPE fees for PPL and IR.
Btw, you only need 15 dual for IR. If you do your PPL with a CFII, you get 3 then. I had 12 hours with my CFII when I did my IR.