@Piotr_Szut Thanks. And that’s a good tip with the UL licence as those are national and you can have as many as you want. It should be easier to get a you’ll probably get some credit for already holding a PPL. Someone on some German forum wrote name of the club in France where he did his exam. The link might be in this thread, I’m not sure.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
People got their act together and did their exams.
Only those who actually want to fly abroad as far as France is concerned.
In France, between 2007 and 2012 included
(source)
There are about valid 42.000 PPL A/H in France, and the French Aeronautical Federation has around 40.000 members – so this is consistent.
France has about 14.000 ATPL/CPL.
So from the above stats barely 10% of private pilots in France have ever taken the ELP exam since its inception in 2007, and the numbers are probably even lower since a number of them may have taken it several times. So roughly 7% of french pilots have ELP.
Norway mandated ELP, which caught me by surprise once I wanted to revalidate my SEP rating and was told I needed ELP to do so. So 100% of Norwegian pilots (with valid licenses) have ELP 4 or higher.
Peter wrote:
For a fact, if you do a PPL in the USA you do get implicitly certified as English LP. Whether EASA accepts this I have no idea but they should.
As an aside, you are now explicitly listed as english proficient on an FAA certificate.
Excellent post, @Aviathor
What I also find totally staggering is that 3.8k signed up for VFR but 16.5k signed up for IFR.
I can fully believe that only 3.8k out of ~40k want to ever fly outside France. Actually it is more than I would expect but it is in the right ballpark. The UK figure would be similar, despite UK pilots having the ready-cooked advantage of the language.
I cannot work out the 16.5k IFR signups, however. There cannot be that many French private pilots interested in flying IFR. Is there some other reason behind this?
@Piotr_Szut Thanks. And that’s a good tip with the UL licence as those are national and you can have as many as you want. It should be easier to get a you’ll probably get some credit for already holding a PPL. Someone on some German forum wrote name of the club in France where he did his exam. The link might be in this thread, I’m not sure.
There is a credit for the written exam if you get any ICAO license.
As there is no minimum training requirement, you don’t need a credit for that.
You are tested by your instructor: there is no such thing as a French UL examiner.
The French UL license is valid for life, no need to fly on a regular basis, and it’s not even required to log your flight time anyway.
French UL licensing and airworthiness is very very lightly regulated.
It is written on the Belgian UL federation website that 50% of the Belgian ULs are registered in France. You may wonder why.
Peter wrote:
I cannot work out the 16.5k IFR signups
Probably 99% professional pilots. of which there are 14.000
OK; I missed that.
Those 16500 IFR signups will surely include the vast majority of the 14000 ATPL/CPL holders?
Also, it does go to show that many a VFR-only pilot in France has little ambition to fly abroad (as already often stated here). The desire to do fly abroad must be more general among those IFR-qualified.
[[edit: very clever of me, only a bit late]]
@Piotr_Szut:
Another point you didn’t mention is the lack of medical requirement in France – I know more than one Belgian ultralight pilot/owner preferring the French regime because her/his condition is too doubtful to pass the Belgian medical test (which includes an electrocardiogram, from a certain age).
OTOH I cannot help having some doubt about the R/T permit being included with the French U/L license – for the sheer fact that Belgium does require a separate R/T test for pilots of balloons and microlights.
I love how emotional/passionate the debate is here, yet how respectful at the same time. (no sarcasm). You’re going to love my “temoignage” (witness account) as it will add 2 angles to the debate in my view. (I’m sure you will tell me if I’m wrong :-) )
So I did my PPL in France, in French, though I do consider myself a native English speaker with little to no accent to give away my mother tongue is Dutch/Flemish. (I was raised in English and have either lived or worked in English speaking territories for most of my live). I’ve been living in the French Alps for the past 14 years where I have picked up French (though I still work in the UK) in which I am fluent but have a very strong accent. As a Belgian (Jan will confirm this) we would use different wording for 80, 90 etc.. vs the typical French quatre-vingt or quatre-vingt dix – much simplified.
The funny thing is (see picture attached) I got a level 6 proficiency for French – for which I had to do NO exams (VFR or IFR) which is pretty much valid for life. The other funny thing, this being Europe & all, is that I did my English proficiency test with a Belgian company called AirEnglish @Lyon airport (LFLY) and only got a Level 5 proficiency level. The company doing the test (verbatim) told me I was a native speaker with a level 6 but that only the DGAC could give this level and that I could take it up with them if I wanted to complain. (I didn’t want to complain as frankly I don’t care about taking the test again in 6 years time) My license as you can see clearly mentions VFR and IFR privileges as the rules in FR are that before starting your IR training one needs at least level 4 proficiency.
So 2 things – clearly one can do the proficiency test with an entity outside of the DGAC when on a FR license (AirEnglish as an example are certified to do this – the quality of the tapes is much better and my ears are pretty bad which is why I decided to go with them) and to do an EIR/CBIR in France at the moment the level 4 proficiency in English is required.
