Fastest PPL in Europe?
 

Hello everyone

I'd like to have your opinion. I am currently working and I will finish my job in November to start my fight training. I have the choice of starting my PPL now in my country (the flight school announces 10-14 months to get it) but I would like to go abroad because I think it's much faster to get it in Eastern Europe or Spain. Do you know countries where I could start my PPL in November and get it fast?

Thank you :ok:

Are you really sure you want a "fast" PPL? The problem with getting a "quickie" is that you will be crap! You will have very limited exposure to weather, airfields and the environment you will be soon be operating in. Get it wrong, which will be simple, and you'll be featuring in a two inch narrow column on page 17 of a local rag. You won't make it into "Rumours and News" unless you do something spectacular. Do yourself a favour and take your time to allow some of the knowledge you will need to soak in.

For what it's worth, the flight school you have seen sound a reasonable bunch if they said 10-14 months.

What scares me is that the weather in Paris is always bad, and that in fact I will spend more time than 10-14 months ..

I know a couple of guys who have finished their PPLs in UK/Ireland within a month, but that's in summer time! During November, December low pressure systems dominate across the Europe bringing low clouds, rain, winds. Days are short. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying you will need some element of luck. I would probably be looking at Spain/Portugal

It is very realistic to do it in something like 2-5 months !

Depend of the weather and the money we can put in..

Did mine in Florida in October. 20.5 days and experienced strong wind, rain, bright sunshine, hot weather and thunder storms...

I did half of my exams before leaving the UK and that eased the pressure. Put the work in and you can achieve it. It wasnt easy...!

We used to get cadets through their training plus the add on to get full ppl within 3-4 months no problem.
Maybe quicker, memory fade, it was over 20 years ago!

I will maybe try to fly a lot during summer here!

A quick PPL is not a good idea.

You could try Fly-in-Spain in Jerez who can accommodate those on limited time budgets.

Make sure you sit your ground school exams before going there, these will take at least 100 hours of study or so. They'll be trickier to get through if you don't have any flying experience, as it's easier to recall things in the exam when you've practiced and observed them in flight training.

Also, make sure you get your Class 2 medical sorted, and try to get the RT exam out of the way as well.

This will all take at least 2-3 months, don't be fooled into thinking you can do it in a hurry.

As ShamrockF said, you can do it in Fly-in-Spain. I did it there in 5 weeks total. My mistake was to go there without completing all the study for the 9 subjects. I started 1 month before and still had a lot to learn, I thought I could do it in parallel but, if you want to fly as much as possible, the theory exams will slow you down. I completed all the hours needed before Skills test in 4 weeks and had to go to work, I then returned after one month and completed the 5 exams that I had left in one day and did my skills test plus NVFR as I had spare time.

So, just study all the 9 subjects (pooley books are awesome, combine with the android app for PPL exam questions that you pay some 10 euro and you're good).
Get your medical before you arrive, preferable in UK if you will get your UK license, it will be faster to receive your license as soon as you finish (got mine sent home in one month).
And try to get your R/T done few weeks before you finish in order not to delay your paperwork.

Good luck!

You've posted (originally) in the professional forum, so I take it you want to do a CPL eventually?
If yes, then your PPL is a stepping stone. This means you have more options, you're not limited to EASA. You CAN do a PPL quickly - ideally the quicker the better. It is much easier to progress if you fly every day, and taking more than 6 months to complete a PPL is frankly ridiculous if it's not by choice. Ideally you will build your​ skills lesson upon lesson: the longer you leave it between lessons, the more your skills will degrade and the more hours you will take to finish. Make no mistake, the bulk of your time will be spent on ground school studies: my advice would be to pass all your exams before you start flying. Then you can bang out your hours in a month. I'd definitely recommend learning in the US for an FAA certificate: the weather is better, it's cheaper and there is only one ground exam. You get a licence on the spot without having to pay for licence issue. It's a no brainer. Of course, if you only intend to fly privately in Europe, of advise you to do an EASA PPL in Europe.

I am currently training at a very well known school modular school in Europe and there is a guy who did his PPL and hour building in the US and he's struggling to keep up with flying "standards" and the European system. I don't really know what the differences are but this is not the first guy I hear had trouble transitioning to fly in Europe after training in the US. And I was about to go to the US.

By the way, I got my PPL at this school in two and a half months but I had a good instructor and weather on my side.

Maybe Fly-In-Spain?

The above point is a good one, and there are obviously some rogue schools around. I would hope that any flying deficiencies would be ironed out during the 25 hours of CPL training. In my case, I did all my flight training and hour building in the states, then had a break from flying of over 10 years, then got to EASA PPL standard in 5 hours..

I have been involved in literally huindrends of PPL all done in month in the UK.

The biggest problem is usually the students lack of drive to get the writtne exams done.

Any idea of the weather in East Europe from December to March? Plan to go to fly here during Winter...?

it depends what you mean with "East Europe", but really no 2 years are ever the same. If I'd had to generalize -starting from the top with Northern Europe - Finland, Baltics, North Poland - days are short, and cloud base is very low and thick around December, very few days with sunshine. Generally windy (not stormy thou), wet and miserable. January and February are the cold months with mostly clear skies, low winds but temperatures can and will drop well below -20°C. Outside clear sky days, it will be warmer (-10, -5ish) but could be accompanied by lots of snow. March can see literally anything, sunny warm days can mix with bitterly cold ones - heavy snow falls can come from nowhere.

down south from Warsaw, the weather can get more unpredictable, depending on the airflows, highs and lows, Hungary, for example can be anything between -15 to +15 in January. Last winter brought many, many days of really poor visibility/haze due to high pressure stagnating around the area. North easterly winds can bring cold and dry weather, anything from south will generate a milder, yet wetter pattern.

Balkans, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria are worth an entire separate article on them selves, for example, Bulgarian coastline will have it's own micro-climate vastly different from the rest of the country

I did my PPL at Wiltshire School of Flying, Thruxton, 27/7/1964, ( time 20.15) to 21/8/1964 (time 19.45). On non-radio, no flap, no brake, Jackeroo biplane taildraggers, modified Tiger Moths.
I then converted to the Chipmunk at the Scottish Aero Club, Perth, nearer home. Convertion took 1 hour 20 minutes, including radio, flaps, and brakes, and electric starter.
If you're renting after getting your PPL, they'll take care of your knowldge of local conditions. Go for the quick PPL. If you've good instructors, you won't have missed anything.
And if you don't have good instructors you'll have lost regardless of how long you take,

I broke the back of my training inside of 5 weeks, accumulating around 35 hours. I experienced varying weather even during this period (I am in the UK, after all) but it varied enough to not allow me to complete the training. My proficiency was through the roof, but was I gathering experience? Yes and no, I suppose.

I am about to complete my training in August (life has got in the way since I began) and I am somewhat glad for it. I have stayed current with theory and kept sharp with other's experiences, in the meantime. I have enrichened my knowledge which, in no doubt, will influence the way I fly. It's important under dual training to allow the experience to "soak in" - and not just to broaden your experiences of what the world will challenge you with (see adverse weather), despite how highly I recommend this as reason alone. Lessons on PFLs and the beginnings of Nav training, for example, will need time to set in. This is important. Don't become a checklist in yourself; an order of actions that you memorise but don't understand. Take the time to learn the "why" too.

For that, I just needed time.

If you're fully immersed, a fast PPL is good.

I got mine in 4 weeks and went to work for A.O.P.A. a year later and won all the offices quizzes vs pilots with 30+ years flying.

The exam difficulty will depend on what you've been doing. I did no study before starting the course. Two years after my last university exam, and two days after an intensive 3 week course at what was about to become Strathclyde university.
I don't remember the exams as a problem .

i would NOT recommend Fly In Spain unless a certain instructor has been sacked.

@ Bose-x tried sending you a PM about this but your mailbox is full, you can't receive any further until you delete some.....

There are many of us that did PPLs on a four week course via the Air Cadet Scholarship scheme, I would say most of us were a decent standard!
I am surprised you are being quoted 10-14 months, many people will take this long, but if you can fly a couple of days a week or more and 2-3 hours each day you should do it in the minimum given a reasonable ability and standard of instruction, so given the weather around 20 days of flying, certainly a lot less than 10 months!

slowly slowy catchy Monkey.
 

You can NEVER rush pilot training,,because its down to many factors..how long you have..the weather..how much money you are budgeting for the training..how quick you can take in all the information..ground school exams..9 [NINE] written exams..flight tests..cost of travel to airport..accommodation if you are doing it abroad..say you do your ppl in the USA for example..you will still have to pass another skill test in the UK When you get back..plus other costs here as well..

I did mine at Inverness in 5 weeks starting from Early/Mid April to mid May - but I did it intensively. I found that doing it this way ironically did help soaking it in and making sure I retained what I learned.

But doing it intensively is one thing and rushing it is another. Luckily for me, I had just finished university when I did it and didn't feel a need to 'rush'. It just so happened that I was generally quite lucky with the weather and didn't find doing 2-3 hours per day too straining

Right: Sounds like you were all lucky. We lived for three weeks in a brown paper bag in a septic tank east of Biggin Hill proper, poring over Trevor Thom volumes until our eyes dropped out. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, and one day, we sat four exams one after the other AND a radiotelephony test, and then that's when purgatory hit us...

... Suddenly we were packed off on Air UK or was it Britannia Airways to Nice, and before we knew it we were out over t'lake west of Cannes-Mandelieu looking out for an old French water tank doing loop the loop so we could make sure we got no rotten fish dumped on us, and we hadn't even seen a glass of Chateau de Chassilier by that point (... "who'd have thought ... "etc) ...

But then the real hard graft began ... we used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work down mill at Aeroport du Cannes-Mandelieu for fourteen hours a day week in-week out for two whole weeks. There were six of us and they'd ask us to fly over mountains three times a day, eat mountains of pizza in the evening washed down by something that was not Chateau de Cassilier and not cold tea, because our CFI told us whatever it was it were good for us, and when we got home after 40 hours and two weeks, almost even before our spanking new CAA licences arrived, but not quite, our CFI or his resident deputy would send us off to see Chris down at Headcorn and maybe on to Shoreham or Sandown, and when we got back, he'd thrash us to sleep with his belt if there were the tiniest risks of incursions reported back by the Biggin or Fairoaks or Redhill controllers or Thames Radar, and book us straight away on twenty five hours of decent cross country, on Night Ratings, then IMC courses too. That were even before we had a chance to rest for five minutes or get to shout anything about Torremolinos, or about the lizards we found in the bidets or suspiciously like the meat on the pizzas while were were getting our PPLs!

Aye. it was BECAUSE we quite liked to be poor, but we were 'appy. My old CFI used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, but it does buy you something very close to it, so sign here!"

And before we knew it we had 100 hours inside eighteen months, half of which was on instruments, and so we'd found out all about licking road clean with our tongues metaphorically speaking, so we could confidently say it were in front of us and still below us, and available for landing on safely under the hood, and all about rotten fish, and the septic tanks that could be hired at other aero-establishments, and even about Chateau de Chassilier back in France if we were very very lucky, plus how not to get sliced in two by an Italian breadknife up in the clouds beyond Nice ;)

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope, they won't.

With sincere apologies to both the Monty Python team and the FTI team!

Now that was my favourite airline[*], from the baked beans to the "welcome to Honolulu".


Baked beans: Air UK used to include baked beans in their breakfast, but decided that this was incompatible with the grown-up-airline image they decided they wanted to cultivate. Guess what? - the punters complained. Guess what? - the baked beans reappeared on the menu.


Touchdown at Stansted on an endless-grey-drizzle day (I think we'd come from Edinburgh). "Welcome to Honolulu" says the hostie on the PA.

[*] Well, depending on how I'm feeling from day to day. The other contender is Aurigny

You can ignore the curmudgeonly old farts who claim that a fast PPL is "crap", as they have very little idea what they're on about. I did my PPL in Florida 11 years back, in 5 weeks, and since then have amassed a CPL, IR, and 2,000 hours flying myself to and around ~50 countries, all for fun or charity.

Flying almost every day for weeks in a row will always beat the occasional sortie between which you forget half of what you learned, and keeps the enthusiasm going too.

Can you just provide a reasonable answer, or just not at all! I would also like to acquire a "FAST" PPL, since I am in full time employment and would like to do a crash course so to speak. Yes, I know it's not ideal to rush to become a pilot however I dont have the luxury of time. I know I can do intermittent training, but I could only dedicate 3weeks a year of holidays to flight training ( and 2 weeks for chirstmas/ family).

I was looking at Fly-In-Spain. Does anyone know, or has any one trained at this ATO? Is 3/4 weeks possible to get a PPL? I'm a very quick learner and flew in the air cadets and University air squadron on the grub tutor but that was 10 years ago

Theoretically it's possible, but it depends on the instructor. I know one PPL who spent four weeks at that site but failed to complete it because the instructor they got was young and went partying every Thursday, Friday & Saturday. Nothing wrong with that, we all should have some time to enjoy ourselves. However, due to the typically hot weather conditions there, they would typically use the morning hours to go flying before the temperatures rose too high and theory would be in the afternoon. However the instructor would still be under the influence the next morning so they would not be able to fly. Effectively they would only fly 4 days out of 7. On the plus side, all the written exams were completed within 3 weeks :)

Whether that instructor is still there is something I can't comment about. When my friend complained to the German boss - I can't remember his name, that is going back to 2014 - and requested a different instructor to fly every day, the response was effectively foxtrot oscar..... So the moral of this story: Make sure you sign up with a caveat demanding that you choose the instructor.

I'm not saying all are alcoholics, heck, that young guy probably wasn't alcoholic either but you could be paired with an instructor with whom you can't work; for the boss of the unit to ignore requests to change the instructor was a bit strange to me.....

Another thing which got me was their method of charging. Based at a large international airport, they often were waiting for CAT to depart. Charging block time plus was just unnecessary, in my opinion.....

I went to FiS in Jerez last year to convert my FAA IR into an EASA IR.

I found the people great, the aeroplanes basic but in good condition, the airport exacting and a bit picky but capable of delivering everything I needed, and the examiner, who is also the (British) boss, appropriately rigorous without being an arse about it (he also posts on PPrune incidentally, but I've no idea if he'll see this thread). Plus on the downtime Jerez is a very nice place to spend some time off, even with Covid restrictions. They delivered what I needed in the planned timescale as well. They weren't the cheapest, but not at the ultra-premium price tag.

I'm anticipating going back late this year for my IR revalidation - and I'm sure you appreciate that I've been around a long time and know of plenty of other options to do that.

I'd suggest talking to them, and I think they'll be realistic about what can and can't be achieved.

I would also advise however, get all of your exams out of the way first, then you *only* need to do the flying in your precious time off.

G

I support the concerns about rushing things and lack of experience.
The fastest place to do it would be at some well structured flight school with a big fleet and organized schedule in a place with constant good flying weather and long daylight. Possibly some EASA-PPL in Florida or California might indeed be the best choice with the added bonus of the latest US web-technologies used for briefings and planning and such?

The problem with going abroad is always that you may end up home without a license aquired within the timeframe planned.... for a number of reasons.

Then you'd have to go there again, and cost rises a lot above what you could've gotten away with using a school in your own neighbourhood.

I did mine in 5 weeks during a vacation in Denmark, and in all sorts of weather (VMC that is).... though I spent considerable time beforehand reading and preparing for the theoretical part.

Never plan overly tight. If you pre-coordinate things with a good school you might be through everything in three weeks time. I would at least plan with four to six. You need weather, instructors, examiner and aircraft availability come together. And you need to pass the tests.Tell the school well in advance how much time you have and how much flying you plan. Some people need time to digest what they learned. Ask yourself how fast can you learn? And make sure that this is planned not as a holiday with family or girlfriend in any way this must be pure flying and theory and learning. You can do the medical first. Make sure to get it for the right requirements.
I would certainly plan this to be more relaxed and enjoyable with more time to spend.

On the whole I don't think that the speed with which some people manage to get a PPL in various sunnier countries is usually a problem.

What *may* be a problem is that they are then qualified to fly in the airspace of a country where they have no real experience - of weather, of RT, of charts, of normal etiquette at airfields, of what the sort of congested airspace around our larger cities can be like, or just of the flying culture. That's solvable of-course, a friendly instructor at a club, or some friends in a syndicate can help you through these things. But I'd strongly recommend that anybody planning on a "quickie" PPL outside the UK, but their subsequent flying to mainly be in the UK, ensures that they've factored that into their overall planning.

G