Just to follow up on the discrimination against modular licence holders mentioned by Mike, BACE ask for either

an Integrated Frozen ATPL

or

a Modular or non-approved Frozen ATPL and 1,000 hours TT

as their application minima. So there is still discrimination against modular licence holders. They quickly modified this about nine months ago from being an 'approved vs non-approved IR' discrimination when they realised that there is no such thing as a non-approved IR under JAR and modular licence holders have an approved IR.

cheers!
foggy (modular frozen ATPL).

Again - lets not bandy about "pass rates" for IR's as there is no such data compiled by anyone.

Its meaningless anyway.

Lets see. Exeter has a lot of ex-mil students converting their military quals to CAA. As you might expect I guess their 'pas rate' is way better than average.

Does this mean as Joe Wannabe looking for a Modular IR course you should book there? Would you have more chance of a first time pass there than at - say - OATS?

Similarly I can think of lots of schools that have an odd intake; Ravenair have quite a few instructors do their IR there with a view to getting a foot in the door for an air taxi job afterwards. So perhaps a lot of their students have 2000hrs - whilst nearly all OATS students have <200hrs.

Guess what that might do to first time pass rates.

All you need to do is:

a) Draw up a shortlist that meet you budget.

b) Go and visit each.

c) Ascertain what kind of school it is, what is their average students background.

d) If the test can be done on the airfield then thats a big plus.

e) TALK to lots of current students. Spend a day there if necessary to do this - not just half an hour.

f) Make your decision, if its a tie go to the nearest one to home.


Thats pretty much all you need to do. Agonising over which is *the* best is pointless. Recommendations from ex-students of different schools here is also of very limited value. Everyone tends to champion wherever they trained. I know I did with PAT (I stand by that - I am an instructor so I'm allowing myself to do that).

WWW

Way off topic I know :) but maybe WWW can answer:

Does the aircraft you train in have an effect on pass rates/time taken to get up to speed?

ie a Dutchess in comparasion to a Turbo Seneca... the dutchess being alot simpler and slower and therefore easier to get to grips with?

I know which one I'd like to do my IR in!! :)

Thx

WWW has cut to the essentials. The most important: visit the schools. This is a big outlay!

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I would have to disagree with Mike on one point - less than 18 months is a very reasonable target for a modular course, as long as you book each module in good time.

Many students are passing groundschool in the 6-month minimum now as I did, or little more, so my own case is not atypical. I sat a one-month course that is not strictly necessary, was off flying ill for 5 weeks and took my CPL over the winter, so had the flying interrupted by weather and the Christmas break. Yet I finished in 15 months. With a summer CPL and no illness and not sitting the supplimentary PPL groundschool 12 months would not have been a problem.

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I also support Alex's point that results cannot be compared. Even if the modular schools knew full results (students don't have to tell us!) they don't show anything unless you know the individual students. All schools vary as to their intake, each class varies as to its character. At SFT we had one class half of which spent every weekend and some weeknights in For Your Eyes Only (a strip club, for those few innocents out there) in Bournemouth (you know who you are lads ;) ). How do you interpret their results? :D Not much we as a school could do about that!