JAA Instrument Rating & European Schools
 

I have a JAA PPL with night qualification and would like to proceed with an IR license. Am in the process of looking at schools which can offer cheap and fast-track JAA training.

Does anyone out there have experience with Spanish or Turkish schools or alternatives and approximate costs :confused:

Sorry to not answer the question, but I felt compelled to say that CHEAP, FAST TRACK and JAA are all mutually exclusive terms :} in my experience.

Cheap? Around UK£15,000. Fast track? Approx 18 months.

Did mine this year. There is no fast route to a JAA IR! You also need to be carefull about mixing exams and flight training countries, while JAA is supposed to provide uniformity generally you will find that some countries will not accept others exams etc.

The IR is a rating not a licence so can therefore be done in any JAR state no mater where the exams were taken.
The exams are the part that will take a long time to complete, but once these have been done the ME-IR can be done for under £10,000 in less than 3 weeks. Have a look at www.aerofanfto.com

Does anybody have experience of that course? 2-3 weeks seems more than a little optimistic.

There is a large thread about aerofan here http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=215585

It seems that they do about 2 1/2 hours in the morning and the same again in the evening, which would be tough going but do-able.

I did the entire practical in 6 weeks full time. The exams are the long part, you have to several hundred hours of compulsory self study and then take the exams which are every 2 months.

It is not just my experiance, read the forums and you will see that 18 months is a conservative estimate on the time it takes to do a JAA IR.

I eagerly await the posting of anyone who does the whole thing a couple of months......

5hrs a day of IR flying? I look forward to meeting the super humans that manage that, they are indeed sky gods.

They seem to get several people through it each month, many of which post on here. I will be out there myself in two weeks so i will let you know. It can be done in far less time than 18 months. You can do the full ATPL exams in less than 5 months and then complete the practical in 3 to 6 weeks. Thats a full year under your estimate.

Let's not get too excited here, I think you're both approaching the question from a different angle. 18 months for the theory sounds reasonable if you're working full-time, but so does 5 months if you're not working at all.

I looked at doing the JAA IR a few years ago.

My estimate, having seen the ground school, sitting on the shelf as approximately 2ft wide stack of A4 paper, was around 2 years for somebody with a business, a life, an ex wife, and stuff like that. I have a BSc in electronics, have designed hundreds of electronic products, and could certainly design a GNS530, hardware, firmware, the lot.

That's the problem: nearly everybody who has the income to play the private GA game at that level (no pun intended) is a successful professional or business person, not exactly young anymore, and they can't just carve out a chunk that size out of their life.

I personally know a few exceptions, some prominent on these forums, but they are either exceptionally academically proficient individuals, or they did the European IR many years ago when there were easier routes, or both.

Nowadays, of course, most serious private pilots go the FAA route, but if that was not available, the IFR GA scene in Europe would by now resemble the drivers of the rechargeable electric trikes on Bognor Regis seafront.

Most people doing the JAA stuff are would-be airline pilots, and most of them have plenty of time, and little money, which is just as well otherwise there would be a dire shortage of 737 RH seat occupants willing to work for £25k p.a. having spent 2x to 3x that getting there.

JAA is run by ex airline and mil people

There is a greater subtlety here. The "mil" people are those who didn't make the grade in the RAF (or its foreign equivalent). Those who wanted to be pilots but weren't good enough.

These people occupy a lot of the senior administrative and regulatory posts.

It's no wonder we have this anally retarded regime.

Now, EASA is trying to bring in a decent Europe-wide license and airframe certification (give them credit for that) and they are already being sabotaged by the national CAAs.

The ex-airline people might actually be OK. They make great bar proppers, especially those with the grey hair and huge bellies and hearing aids, and the stories about departing from Kabul in a 707 with one duff engine.