In other words, there is no mandatory ground school for the PPL.
If some school / club / ATO / DTO is forcing people to attend a physical classroom for x hours (as is the case for the European IR, or higher) then they are ripping some people off. Some people may find it useful but to others it will be just a ripoff.
Yeah – the old “you need us to sign you off, so we have you over a barrel and you need to do what we tell you to do” practice is still there. It probably makes it impossible to just walk into any school and sit the exams. In the UK you could do it, in my days, at PPL level. At IR level, definitely not; they wanted to see ~£1000 from you first (buying some ring binders and handing in some homework).
FlyWest in LOWI
Peter wrote:
In other words, there is no mandatory ground school for the PPL.
I quoted FCL.210 which says there is. You can’t sign up for an exam yourself – an ATO/DTO has to do it. Of course they could silently allow someone to take the exams without having taking the ground school, but that is not the same thing as “there is no mandatory ground school”. The national CAA has to trust the ATO/DTO on this unless they do an audit.
Again, the regulations don’t mandate a specific number of study hours or classes. But the ATO/DTO have to make a training programme – also for ground school – and that will include hours, classes etc. Self-study programmes are possible but then again, the ATO/DTO has to specify how the self-study programme is set up. The ATO/DTO also has to keep records with “details of ground training”.
Most people understand the phrase “mandatory ground school” as an enforced # of hours sitting on one’s bum in a chair in a classroom belonging to the school.
And that is exactly what the “gold plated professional pilot in Europe” papers (IR or higher) need 
The PPL does not have this. So each CAA, and then each school, can do what they like. So the OP needs to dig around and find out what the actual requirements of various schools are. I assume he has done the usual thing and hammered the computer QBs, and is getting good pass marks, so he just wants to sit the exams.
This is digressing from the thread topic but the online IR etc exam providers (e.g. CATS) have negotiated, in the interest of business development, an “equivalence between home study and physical sitting on one’s bum on their premises”. I don’t know specific numbers off hand but say 100hrs home study is equivalent to 25 hrs physically sitting at their premises. Of course we know that “home study” means absolutely nothing so long as you hand in the assignments and pass the exams. But it shows how fluid the “mandatory ground school” situation is.
There is no mandatory hours or classrooms in PPL full stop !
Also, I am glad we have an ATO like CAPT (not CATS) for advanced courses, they are tailored for someone with professional & social life and they deserve every nickel for their TK courses: IR, ATPL, CPL
You still have to do hours in physical or virtual classrooms but 1/ you can do everything on weekends and 2/ when you feel ready you sit the exams !
Snoopy wrote:
FlyWest in LOWI
Yeah, I did my PPL with them over remote classes, went very well and would recommend
Peter wrote:
Yeah – the old “you need us to sign you off, so we have you over a barrel and you need to do what we tell you to do” practice is still there. It probably makes it impossible to just walk into any school and sit the exams. In the UK you could do it, in my days, at PPL level.
I still did that, in 2012. In preparation for the practical training towards the EASA PPL in the US, I wanted to have the theoretical exams out of the way as much as possible. I read Trevor Thom, contacted a UK club, flew to Stansted, had a good English breakfast, met my “instructor”, talked a bit with him, and then sat the exams and went home, more or less.
