ATPL DL OAT or Bristol gs ?
 

Y'all have been very helpful so far. I avoided being ripped off by CABAIR and the likes.

Now can y'all help me have an idea about OAT and Bristol's DL ATPL. I know both are good institutions and provide great material. But I don't wanna make a choice and regret or find out (the hard way) that I could have chosen a better school. I could 4-5 hrs per day, I am off work for a few months.

Soooo ???? :confused:

hey AirP, I'm also in the Paris area, I am with Bristol.gs going for mod1 brush-up next week, I'm really happy about the course, the notes are great, you have the exact same text (plus great animated figures) in the computer program which is good when you have to spent a week far from home and cannot bring the heavy books with you, also even if it is DL you have their forum where you can ask questions which are quickly answered... we'll see how it comes down when sitting the exams :ok:
Also I cannot comment on other schools ..

Im also with Bristol correspondence course and im happy with their notes.How do i get into their forum,what s the address?

There really isn't any choice between them. They both do the job.

I would choose the one which you can get to / live at cheapest. There really isn't any significant difference in quality between the 2.

MJ

BTW this thread is just going to be a list of people saying they had a great time at one or the other and passed the lot. And as it is very uncommon for anyone to have gone to both (because they are BOTH so good) its not really going to help you as much as paying for a flight over and going to see for yourself what each school is like.

Have been distance learning since Feb 05 with final exams in March this year. With LMU which divides course into 3 phases with a revision week for each phase. Notes in form of text books which are pretty comprehensive and by religiously ploughing through each one you come out quite well prepared.
As to time commitment, over the year I have dedicated about 12 to 15 hrs every week on top of a job which also takes up between 50-60 hrs.
Tough, but enjoyable perversly, because there is an excellent end goal and the subject matter is interesting. If it isn't you shouldn;t become a pilot.
Hope this helps a bit and best of luck.

I kept a very detailed view of each day I worked throughout the months it took me to get through the ATPL ground studies. It took me about 11 months.

The total hours I worked at home ended up at 650 or so. The brushup weeks and exam weeks were very long days. You'd finish at 5pm at the school and head back to the B&B for another good 6hrs of work. Each exam day saw a race back to the digs to continue cramming: I didn't record those hours.

I also had a full-time job too, so it can be done. Others just did the DL, but worked at it full-time. Some completed it all in 4 months.

I was actually about to ask the same question as Air Polygamy.

If there are any OAT distance ATPL students around I would like to hear their opinions about the course as well. :ok:

Isn't one short coming of these courses that they are divided into 2 parts? For distance learning wouldn't 3 or 4 work much better?

Thanks! :ok:
Icer

I am shortly about to finish my ATPL's Distance Learning With OAT. I have been nothing but impressed with the Quality of the brush-up course and have no complaints regarding help & support when i have asked for it. Also the Assesments you send in are marked in very reasonable time. They are however a little more expensive than Bristol. A few people i know used Bristol and highly recommended them. I have signed up to use their Online Feedback Bank, which i have to say is an excellent supplement to the material i recieved from OAT. Like mad_jock said there are not many people with bad words to say about either establishment.
:confused:

If you go to Bristol or OATS for the DL you will get a good service from both of them. If you put the work in, you will pass all 14 subjects. So then, how do you select one over the other? It would come down to things like which one is the easiest to travel to, is one nearer to you, cheaper, or does one feel better to you when you speak/see their representatives.

My choice was easy. BGS were prepared to meet with me in the week I was available, Oxford were not. BGS then explained about the fact you could email your test results, so I was sold. But, I reckon the teachning and standard is similar between the two. You might want to check out GTS in Bournemouth as they seem to have a good reputation.

Time ?
 

And time wise. How long duz it take to finish in ... let's say 6-7 months ? Being off wok shoudl help but are there subjects that require an instructor to be with you or is everything well explained and u only need to read and read and hammer the tests over and over again ???

Working in a full time job may mean you take 10-12 months.

Just doing DL full-time can mean it takes 4 months (2 months for each module).

I think that might have changed. They now seem a bit cheaper than BGS.

Curious to know why you reckon Cabair would be ripping you off...any more than OAT or the like would be? Be aware that there are two parts to Cabair, Bournemouth which is only a recent addition that they took over, and Cranfield that has been around a while.
Cranfield also runs modular distance learning courses. The general view as I gather is that they can't be viewed as equal atm.

Bournemouth
 

I believe u fella. But believe me too, CABAIR has been acting up with me even before I enrolled. Thank God I did not. They never reply on time, make u wait for answers. Send u fake quotes .. I'm just talking about Bournemouth not Cranfield. I don't know these guys who are probably the ones who gave CABAIR its big name ...

Bearing in mind that there's two weeks' compuslory ground school, plus one week of exams for each module, that must have been a superhuman effort! I've spent four months full time just on module one so far - three and a half months working through the course material and two weeks using the question bank - and I've still got the ground school fortnight and exam week to go. I hope to cover module two quicker but 5 weeks? Heavens man, did you never sleep?

WazzooThis is not really true, in fact mostly wrong. Cabair Bournemouth came from EPTA, which was set up by Cabair and never a totally separate organisation (they couldn't have a Cabair school in Bournemouth for a contracted time after selling Bournemouth Flying Club, hence the EPTA branding). Some of the local management ran SFT before it collapsed, but Cabair Bournemouth was always part of Cabair.

They did recently take over the shell company of PTC, in order to get back the flying approvals they had lost, but that has nothing to do with the groundschool. There are only 2 options in Bournemouth for distance learning - GTS and BCFT.

Distance learning ground school hrs ????
 

Hi

Info needed please...
Whilst doing atpl's distance learning does anybody know the amount of groundschool hrs required by the caa to sit the exams.

Thanx for your help

Vilo

For the first attempt a total of 650 hours, a minimum 10% completed in the classroom.

If you run out of time or don't get them all done in 6 attempts then you need a minimum of 60hrs instruction before you can try again.

If you pass them all but don't get your IR within 36 months of the last exam you can re-sit after training 'at the discretion of the Head of Training of an approved FTO'.

The 36 month ATPL theory validity rule applies to both CPL and IR, even if only on single engine aircraft, correct?