Bristol.GS additional cost for paper manuals
 

So I've been looking at starting my ATPL's for some time, and after various discussions, school visits and comparisons, Bristol was always quite the obvious choice.

The cost for Module 1 has been £1450, and the complete course £2350.

I have just been browsing the website tonight, with the intention of purchasing the course this evening, and have noticed they have added an additional £500 to the cost if you would like the manuals in paper in addition to digital.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand in today's age, the majority of study will be completed on mac/iPad.. etc, BUT with a price tag of nearly 2.4k, I expect to have a full set of books to source when I need them, from the shelf.

The additional cost for these paper manuals have just been added, as last week when I checked the website, it stated that the manuals were included with the course package.

Does anyone else think this is unreasonable?

It may have swayed me to go elsewhere.

Cheers

Have you seen the cost of colour printing ?.

Better option is to buy the course digitally, go on eBay and buy second hand notes for 150-200 quid.

BGS is a very good course , the course notes are excellent.

On par with BGS is capt.gs , his course notes are also excellent and cheaper :ok:

I understand the cost of colour printing, but ultimately since last week the cost has increased by £500 for the same product. I think that's extremely excessive!

I will check out captonline thanks :)

Real cost of colour printing would be about 200-300 quid, if you brought your set of 14 pdf files to a professional, and asked them to print only one set of books.
So when you sell your books 500 or even 1000 (i'm looking at you Jeppesen) then you're making a very profitable margin.
Since the 200-300 quid already included the professional's margin.

Print on demand for roughly 800 pages of A4 is about £100, excluding folders etc. If you use litho and print 1000 copies on one set of plates in somewhere like China or Eastern Europe it can be considerably cheaper, except that you can't make changes so readily.

I too like paper manuals for reference. It's all very well having them on an ipad for browsing in a hotel room on a nightstop.

£500 seems steep to provide the paper in addition to e-manuals. On the type of aircraft I fly, training is provided by FlightSafety International in Dallas. They now do not offer paper manuals for my type of aircraft. They do however give crews a free ipad to keep personally and give us new ones every two years as a sweetener.

According to their website the £500 additional cost for paper manuals is a 'discounted' cost when brought with the full course, to add insult to injury.

Whilst an ATPL isn't documented as such like a degree, in 10 years to come, I personally find it quite valuable to have copies of the materials I studied for. Besides, in 10 years I expect the software BGS are using won't be compatible with any new operating systems that are around.

I contacted PadPilot (ironically) today, along with CATS, and have been informed that paper manuals are included with both courses.

I'll be contacting Bristol.GS with my concerns, let's hope I can get a positive answer and hit the buy button!

I'm pretty sure no one reopens their ATPL study books after having passed them...

Let's face it, the stuff here is either useless, or used frequently enough that you don't need a book.

I think you may be overestimating things a bit

As the poster above me says, once you get your license, the last place you'll be going is back to your books. I don't know of any pilots that have done. It has been said to me that you will forget over 50% of the stuff almost as soon as you pass the tests, another 40% within a year ... then you will spend the rest of your career with about 10% of it knocking about among the grey matter.

I am attending an integrated school and we are using BGS and the ATPdigital, the notes are fantastic. I too at the start wanted the paper copies (i like to write additional notes in my books, highlight definitions etc) as this is how i studied for my A Levels. But part of being a pilot is being able to adapt, 10 years ago everything on most flight decks was paper based, now over 90% is computer/tablet based ... we are in a career in which we must be able (and willing) to adapt regularly and be pushed out our comfort zones.

You may not even need the books for all modules, does the school your attending have a library where you can perhaps borrow the books for the modules you do need them for?

Unless you convert your licence ....then they become very useful:ok:

Good point. A good friend of line has eight licences and speaks the relevant languages fluently - his advice is to get a good core knowledge in your head from the start, then you're not continually learning dodgy questions.

I hate to keep repeating this, but by the end of your career you will need 90% of that knowledge.

I have done my Bristol course about 5 years ago.
I Personally prefered to read the material from the paper print as I find I can spend more time reading off paper rather than off an ipad/computer.

I still have the books should I decided to look something up, although a quick search on their software makes life a lot easier.

I reckon it is all personal preference when revising for your initial ATPL.

Best of luck with you ATPL

Still have paco's Course Notes on my shelf, used them for FAA and CASA exams

Still have BGS and PACO Course notes on my shelf too- use them all the time for reference purposes. Personally, I think they are both well worth the money but horses for courses...

I have a good many aviation- related technical books, some of which are dated from the 1950s, and I frequently use them for reference purposes. My view is that you can never have too many sources of reference for subjects in which you are interested. But other people will of course have a different opinion.

The crux of this thread appears to be the suggestion that BGS stopped providing their books as an integral part of the course material, included in the course fees, and now offer them at an additional cost. Logically this process should have resulted in a reduction ln the course fees to compensate for the reduced materials provided. If there was no such reduction, and if there was no compensating increase in other course materials provided, then it was in effect a hidden price increase.

Exactly Keith, which is what bothers me a little. I guess I'm just one of those people who will look back and think 'I studied those thick 14 books' and get some gratification out of it.

It wouldn't matter if they had a half decent atpdigital service that hasn't got so many issues, haven't been able to use it for 3 days and it has effected my studies

Hi Pilotjimbo,

Did you by the Bristol course in the end? What happened about getting the paper manauls?

Thanks

Hi!

Can we take the exam in another country if we did Bristol GS?

Yes, so long as it is an EASA member state