If I may, I would like to join in 😉 😀 .
First thing the ‘savings’ if you are doing the NPPL. I’m with Moggy on this one. You actually don’t ‘save’ any money worth talking about. If you take into account the cost for the flying hours from 32 to 45 hours. Let’s face it, pilots with 32 hours, and a PPL, are very inexperienced, and need to get in all the flying they can to get some ‘feel’ for things. In an ideal world, I should think a new PPL would need to fly about 100 hours in the first year to get his/her currency up to standard. That way, they will expand their experience and up their currency level, rather than stagnate at the PPL issue level, or even in some cases, go backwards on the learning curve. That is surely not save way to go about flying.
To ‘save’ money, by buying into a syndicate, is rather a misnomer. Actually I think it would be a lot cheaper for normal PPL’s to just rent. Let’s face it, there are a lot of ‘hidden extras’ in the syndicate package. These extras will pump up the hourly price for pilots that are not flying a lot. A friend of mine used to own a share in a PA 22 Colt some years ago, and he did the maths for owning vs. renting and the results were such that he needed to fly more than 25 hrs. a year to break even. Agreed, these numbers are for Icelandic operations, but I shouldn’t think there was much of a difference. Also, trying to buy a share with only 32 (or even 45 for that matter) hours could prove problematic. I’ve only Iceland to go by here, but you simply can’t find a syndicate here that accepts members with less than 100 hrs.
Now for the the JAR PPL and instrument training. The instrument training is NOT a requirement to get a JAR licence. Six years ago, I wrote up a training syllabus for a flight school here, when the JAR’s were coming into effect. I ended up in a bit of a corner there 😉 Because, if you take all the minimum hours requried by the JAR’s for things like dual exercises, dual solo, solo exercises, solo XC etc, you only end up with something like 35 hrs. total. That is 10 hrs short. So what I did in that case was to include 5 hours instrument time into the syllabus, and spread the remaining five hours on some of the other subjects, like dual XC and dual exercises. (IIRC I put three hours extra on dual XC and 2 on dual exercises). Other schools have done it a bit differently, one other I know of here in Iceland has put the five hours of instrument training in AND the night rating and end up with 43, still 2 hrs short of the 45 hours.
This has all grown a rather longer than I thought at first, but I hope it answers some questions.
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