I should have added, a block of days dedicated to training is even more efficient if you can do it away from your home base. Stay in a cheap hotel , have meals with the instructor, keep fully focussed. Keeping away from the home environment, if family allows, means you can focus on learning with your instructor both in and out of the cockpit 14 hours a day without distractions.
When I lived in Switzerland I did my FAA IR this way in Le Touquet for blocks of 3 or 4 days, with Mark van Niftrik (very good by the way) and when the time came to finally do the EASA IR conversion I went to Poznan, Poland for three days with John Page (also very good).
I did start my PPL in autumn too (uh mei, don’t ask when, gettin old) and had quite some ‘flyability ratio’ due to the fact that I decided to do training whenever there was a slight opportunity to get in the air and allowing sessions to be ‘inefficient’ for training syllabus, but counting as ‘experience’ under marginal conditions. Money was no matter that time and I figured it as advantage to do marginal weather with instructor instead of getting into sh*t alone afterwards – even had some first IFR training with FE when ‘senior after solo’ ;-) in training.
In my club we start the theory in early september and run it until early may. Once per week on sundays, plus self studies at home.
Students can start in the fall (I did), but be ready to cancel most flights during the fall/winter. By april you can fly very regularly, and be done during the summer.
That’s how I took my PPL.
Much the same in my club. We start theory in mid-October and finish in mid-March. Many students start flying more or less immediately while other wait till spring when the theory is done.
The problem with spreading out training is that the PPL then costs you twice as much.
And I don’t buy the frequent assertion that you are a better pilot if you wasted half your lessons going backwards; this was often asserted by the European training industry to stop people doing a PPL intensively in the US where you could knock off the whole thing in 6 weeks. In reality only a few (mostly young) people were able to do that, however.
Peter wrote:
And I don’t buy the frequent assertion that you are a better pilot if you wasted half your lessons going backwards; this was often asserted by the European training industry to stop people doing a PPL intensively in the US where you could knock off the whole thing in 6 weeks. In reality only a few (mostly young) people were able to do that, however.
I don’t buy this either. I only took the minimum 45 hrs spread over 1.5 years, but I am pretty sure if I had flown the same hours spread over 6 weeks, I could have finished in 35 hrs just as well, if that were legally possible.
How much do you actually fly each day on an intensive course? If you want to finish in the minimum flight time possible, I believe the best is to fly two flights a day, not cramming in as much as you can. I distinctly recall from my flight training how I improved much more from one day to the next rather than from one flight to another on on the same day. (I was 24 at the time.)
Two flights a day is probably the max for most people.
I was doing that on the FAA IR in Arizona. That was very hard flying (hardest I’ve ever done) and I was 49 then.
Peter wrote:
Two flights a day is probably the max for most people.I was doing that on the FAA IR in Arizona. That was very hard flying (hardest I’ve ever done) and I was 49 then.
I concur; especially if you have a good instructor who will give you a proper pre-flight briefing and a thorough résumé once your lesson is over.
This makes 1hr of flight time nearly 3hrs of activity. This twice a day = 6hrs per day – More than enough for most people to absorb effectively.
[Peter: You beat me to it: I was 55 when I took the IR and “Teaching Old dogs, New tricks” certainly takes time!]
If training in The States, (which I recommend), I would definitely encourage doing all the ‘Written’ study beforehand.
With modern computer programmes one can pace oneself to be getting a 100% regular score before you depart.
Once you get to the US, (since you can only do the ’Written’s’ there now), you can ace the computer exam the moment one lands. Then one can concentrate on nothing but flying instruction after that.
But as Peter says, Don’t delude yourself: Getting the FAA IR is hard flying with a thorough (at least 1 hour) ‘Oral’ exam thrown in at the end!
Airborne_Again wrote:
I believe the best is to fly two flights a day, not cramming in as much as you can. I distinctly recall from my flight training how I improved much more from one day to the next rather than from one flight to another on on the same day. (I was 24 at the time.)
I agree. I remember that I once scheduled a 4hr long flight during PPL training, but we aborted after 2 hrs because it was all a bit too much and I was starting to feel dizzy doing lots of coordinated turns between the clouds.
