Also does it seem to anyone else that 100 hours of classwork for a basic PPL is just somewhat excessive – almost the equivalent of 3 weeks of a full time job? (And also the absurdity of requiring a certain number of “hours” for ground study as if it were a physical skill – surely if you can demonstrate you have adequate grasp of the knowledge required, it doesn’t matter if you acquired it in 1 hour, 10 hours or 100 hours of study?)
Mandatory PPL ground school was an EASA proposal at one stage but it was abandoned.
For fairness sake (towards LT), I did get prompt answer from them. The reason for this was people taking flight lessons and the theory abroad, then coming back to do skill test here to get a Norwegian PPL. Examiners reported to LT because the candidate’s level of theoretical knowledge, as well as flying skills were too low for the examiners to approve them. This was some RFs somewhere in Europe, don’t know where, but apparently several places with equally consistent poor results.
I don’t see the problem they’re trying to solve. The candidate fails the skills test, so it’s still the candidate’s problem!
My guess, the examiners are probably fed up wasting their time on hopeless cases, and tired of LT not doing anything about it. This could have been going on for years for all I know. There are other possibilities also. Maybe some examiners have been sloppy, and approved candidates that wasn’t approved in the country of the RF, and the word goes around. I don’t know, Maybe some RFs are more or less “black listed” in their home countries, and they have been spreading the word to other CAAs?
It’s not as much to solve anything maybe, but more of a reaction to what obviously is a known and repeated problem.
Incidently, are some of those examiners also CFI’s who have not had enough students recently and are trying to protect their home turf? This looks like a protectionist measure to me and a huge step backwards.
Examiners in Norway are always airline captains, with no connections to schools (I have never met or heard of anyone that wasn’t). Examination is more of a “hobby” thing for them. Protecting their home turf is definitely not the case. Their home turf is in the left seat of a Boeing. My initial thoughts was that LT somehow had been “persuaded” by some ATO, or “lobbied” as it is called today 
That seems a bit far fetched also, all the time the examiners are the ones who have “lobbied” LT. I have no doubts it is/was some real situation going on, but LT didn’t go into details.
