Intensive PPL

You won't get a PPL in €€€€€€€€€-land for much less than 9k.

Especially if everybody in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece goes out to buy a JCB to get their money out of the banks...

The key to doing a PPL "cheap" is to do it in the minimum time, which requires

• a good instructor, available when you want to fly
• competence
• not wasting currency by flying e.g. at weekends only
• good weather

Assuming you can take care of the first three, the most popular place is Spain (FIS at Jerez) followed by possibly Greece (Egnatia at Kavala). I am sure there are others, but I looked into this for the JAA IR conversion and it is obvious there is no free lunch.

Peter, don't take this as an ad :) In our PPL school it can be done for €10k (everything included) which is some £8.5, instructors are available 24 hours if needed :) and weather is nice - the only problem is that we're quite far from UK. And we use G1000 equiped C172 for training rather than some wreckage :)

Don't use the services of FIS (Jerez). PM me if you want to know more.

It's good to have feedback here, positive and negative. Times change, people change...

I know the good reports of FIS were tied to a particular instructor working there... I hope he has now dried out from his well publicised flight.

Croatia must be a great place to learn (I regard it as Europe's flying paradise, combining great ATC with great locations to fly to) but I was totally unable to establish contact with any school there when planning the IR.

One thing which is clear to me, for a UK person training outside the UK, is that the school needs to be geared to train in English. Most schools are not - especially in some places like (perhaps suprisingly) France. That is why Egnatia are fairly popular; they train almost all foreigners (I mean not Greeks). But living in that village near Kavala must be really hard

Try here: http://www.cosmoflightschool.com/

I was totally unable to establish contact with any school there when planning the IR.

It was totally unclear to me why it was so. I urged few people you contacted to reply but without any result. Strange ... Maybe the language barrier was the problem.

Its perfectly possible to knock off a PPL in a month in the UK if you do it at the right time of year.

Its also possible to get the lot done for under 6 thousand pounds.

I did mine in Inverness in the winter and off the top of my head it took 6 weeks. The scenery can't be beaten and the prices were very competitive within the UK. It would be reasonable to expect to get it done somewhat faster in the summer.

I am being serious - Inverness has a favourable microclimate and we were often flying when Aberdeen or Dundee were shut down. However, long-distance flights could be an issue. There were only a handful of locally unflyable days (perhaps 2 fogbound) but waiting for the weather for my first solo and qualifying x-country held me up. I also took a week getting my medical - I had wrongly assumed that because there were lots of local AMEs it would be easy.

The more I've flown in other places, the more I've come to appreciate Inverness. It's a big airport but not too busy. There are MATZs nearby, for MATZ crossings. I landed on grass at Dornoch a few times. There are several runway directions so you can practice crosswind landings and are rarely blown out. And despite the generally good weather, you tend to learn a lot about weather. The airspace is relatively simple, and you get to the training ground very quickly which makes it a very time-efficient place to learn handling skills. They also did some aerobatic training on a Super-Decathlon. And essentially it was a friendly, well thought out flying school.