It seems my local flight school has ceased to be a flight school and is now focused on sightseeing flights.

The next nearest schools are all about 1.5 hours away so I'm considering driving an additional 20 minutes into Washington state and learning there.

The price, after currency conversion, is similar, but the FAA PPL allows for home study of the ground school portion which will be a huge savings in time. Also, for a few extra hours of training time I can get a night rating on my converted license, which would cost considerably more in Canada.

I realize I'll need to study the Canadian regs for my conversion exam but otherwise it seems like a much better idea to get it done in WA.

I'm a pretty quick student, I don't anticipate the ground school or Canadian regs exam being a problem.

Can anyone shine some light on this decision?

You can do your ground schooling online with Canadian PPL as well. I did mine that way. Had all my ground schooling done when I went to flight school so all I had to do was fly. It saved me a lot of time and I will do the same when I step up to my CPL.
I'm curious about your night rating comment. What do you mean by it? It only took me 15 hrs of training to get my night rating. Is it that many less for the US PPL?

David

I dont think there is a separate night rating in the US. Still need to do mine here.

I don't know anything about the Canadian Written Test, but the FAA PPL Written is the hardest test because it covers everything. The Commercial is more concerned with Commercial and Instrument things, ATP air transport things, etc. Questions are randomly selected from a large data base. There is no prioritization toward need to know. Just as many nice to know or what is that? shows up.

I haven't prepped anyone for the PPL in years, so hopefully it has gotten better. In the old days there were just several series of tests and newer series were developed using Most Missed questions. Any professional educator knows this is problematic. Poorly written items are going to be most missed. Exam-a-grams were published by the FAA to reteach the same poorly written item and it was retained. We had students memorize idiotic items so we could prep others on answers to questions that made no sense.

When the FAA first computerized the item selection, all those old items were in the database. Does any current instructors here know if there are still meaningless or poorly written items in the database?

The FAA PPL includes the night endorsement and the requirements are: 20 dual,10 solo, 3 hood/instrument, 3 cross county, and 3 night, and 5 solo cross country.

However, for the night endorsement to carry over to Canada the pilot must have logged 10 night hours and 10 instrument hours, 5 of which can be in a simulator.

I will check to see if the local schools will allow me to do the ground school on my own time. Driving an hour and a half to sit in a class for 2 hours for a dozen weeks doesn't hold much appeal.

Not sure on your country of citizenship, but here is some useful info on non-citizen requirements for training in the US.

http://www.aopa.org/Pilot-Resources/Fli ... t-Training

Check out www.pilottraining.ca. They have the ground school course. I found it very easy to work with and very informative. I didn't even buy the "from the ground up" book and I don't think I missed anything, as they covered it all. I'm sure any school should be able to count it as ground school if you get a signed paper saying you've done the hrs...

Also, when the time comes to write your Canadian exams, check out pilotexams.com. It's $25 but you can take as many practice exams online as you want. After doing a few of those, my transport canada exam was no problem, most of the questions were the same.

Jeff

That's great info Jeff! I'll need those when I do my CPL.

I have both US and Canadian license's. It was just a matter of taking a simple test when getting the Canadian ticket, as I already had the US one (there are just a few differences in airspace/radio freqs). My previous log book entries were all that was required to get the night flying added on. I did not bother transferring the instrument rating to Canada, as I do not use that here, since I am on floats most of the time

Steve

I did my ground school at pilotraining.ca as well, I was able to do it at my own pace, thought it was well done and I did really well on my written test. Just a note if you plan to fly as a student in the US and are a canadian citizen as I am. I did some training as a student in Naples Florida last year and to get approved as a student it cost me about 400$ US to get through all the red tape just to be able to train there ( that was all dual time, no solo) the school was good and helped me through the paperwork.

Just thought I'd mention it as it is another expense

Roamer

Steelroamer wrote:I did my ground school at pilotraining.ca as well, I was able to do it at my own pace, thought it was well done and I did really well on my written test. Just a note if you plan to fly as a student in the US and are a canadian citizen as I am. I did some training as a student in Naples Florida last year and to get approved as a student it cost me about 400$ US to get through all the red tape just to be able to train there ( that was all dual time, no solo) the school was good and helped me through the paperwork.

Just thought I'd mention it as it is another expense

Roamer

Thanks for that. I was just informed by the school in Bellingham that I'll have to jump through some red tape.

As luck would have it, one of the members on here told me about a CFI here in Squamish. I'm just waiting for his contact info. Between him and the distance education for the ground school, I think I'll be able to get it sorted locally.

Thanks all.