You could say the EIR has been a disastrous failure; in the first two years the UK CAA issued 1 and the French DGAC issued 1. Commonly known as the “Chocolate Teapot” it has shown itself to be of little use to anyone! If you can’t fly an instrument approach, what is the point?
I did mine with Rateoneaviation, and was very pleased with the training. Found a local B&B and stayed there until finished.
I second Fly310s comment on Airways Flygutbildning. Not related to the school, but based at the airport, ideal for IR training.
Tumbleweed wrote:
If you can’t fly an instrument approach, what is the point?
The point is from my experience, that there is often plenty VMC at the departure aerodrome as well as at the destination and one faces low clouds and mist enroute – often not mentioned at all in the forecast. Happened more than once on my flights.
I’d fly basically in the same conditions as now (VFR-rated only). I’m not keen on flying an approach to the minimum, so the EIR would perfectly match my needs. I would rather consider it as a safety-backup.
The reason for me with EIR is to use it as stepping stone to get “full IR” with CBIR later on. My flights currently are XC more or less from uncontrolled airports, where there are not IR approaches or departures. The faster route would be to hop to the IR course now, but its quite expensive and lots of work. This however is not 100% out of the question.
Thanks for the feedback. I sent message to Flygutbildning and will check rateone aviation too.
I could have done the vast majority of my flights legally with an EIR only. I didn’t go for that route because I had a UK IR(R) and just booked 4 weekends to “upgrade” to a CBIR. If I had zero Instrument experience (and didn’t live in the UK where I could do an IR(R), I might have done the EIR and the CBIR straight after, especially if I doing everything over a short period of time wasn’t an option.
Dear hivemind,
The quest for EIR from Finland seems to become a bit more complicated. The swedish company mentioned here offers only the flying lessons. The theories must be done in some other place. They have a Swedish partner for theory part, but their distance learning course has few mandatory pre-set weekends which do not suit me. So a bit of an issue there…
I found this: https://www.cat-europe.com/en/portfolio-items/eircb-ir-course/
If I understood correctly, I could buy this course, self study and ask for some Finnish ATO to give me the required 8 hours of local training (even thou they do not have EIR in their menu), and thats it? If indeed the theories could be studied in Finland (and thus the tests done here), this would make more sense.
So how is it?
Edit: so I read it a bit more. It seems the german school is still responsible for the training, but I would need the 8 hours bit done somewhere. Then the theory tests would be done in Germany as well, correct?
http://www.flight4000.dk/instrument-rating-eir/ (in Danish – google translate does a fair job here)
This is a fairly new ATO at Roskilde, EKRK, Denmark. Instrument theory and EIR / CB-IR training is given here. Pricing is on the website. Presently there are 2-3 EIR students and about 12 CB-IR students. I mention this option as I know the ATO and was just recently accepted as an IR instructor there. At least one other ATO on the airfield provides EIR training and theory courses also.
I am not sure about the EIR. It might be a little early to pronounce it a failure yet, but it definitely has not caught on as the attractive resting step on the way to the full IR that some people, myself included, had expected.
Pehu wrote:
Edit: so I read it a bit more. It seems the german school is still responsible for the training, but I would need the 8 hours bit done somewhere. Then the theory tests would be done in Germany as well, correct?
You can do the theory in one country and the practical part in another (as I did for my CBIR), but you cannot do parts of your theory in different countries. So you would have to travel to Germany for the classroom part of the CAT course and sit the exams in Germany, I suppose. For the practical part, you could spread out the training as long as it conforms to the general cross-crediting rules for the EIR, but your final ATO would have to do an assessment of your competences and then decide how much training you still need (this could be a paper exercise as I understood, but each country will interpret it differently).
Revisiting this thread a bit.
I decided to go full IR theories (as I couldnt find suitable EIR theory package that had proper distance learning schedules for me) and I can do them here in Finland. This works nicely to me, althou it has extra work.
However, the situation also changed (or may change) that I’ll have my own plane in june/july. Yey! Can I complete CBIR with just a teacher or do I need to enroll to a school that offers CBIR? I can do the EIR part in a school and complete the training with IR teacher for the approach/departure parts for full CBIR. But does that work so that I could do all the stuff with the IR instructor?
One other option is to go to Västerås for training, but that does sound a bit stupid if my own plane would be sitting on apron… :) Maybe on option would be to fly with my own plane in Sweden?
