patowalker wrote:"up to 9,000 European residents hold FAA pilot certificates.”
http://jdasolutions.aero/blog/easa-faa- ... son-detre/
Not convinced about the numbers suggested here. Broadly, there will be
1) Private pilots flying on FAA certificates who only want/need VFR capabilities. I'd guess quite a few would already have a UK/EASA PPL (or would have had one in the past that could be renewed).
2) Private pilots flying on FAA certificates with an FAA IR. I suspect many will already have UK PPL and be using a piggyback FAA certificate that hosts their IR. For them, it's passing the Initial IR Skill Test (no theory required) which is not trivial and could be expected to require some
3) Commercial pilots, resident in the UK, flying N-Reg commercially. Hard to know what UK/EASA qualifications they might already have and/or options their employers will choose for them. Some might retain a CPL but then have retired and be flying privately, but I think for the purposes of this forum's audience they can be ignored.
The FAA
publish quite extensive data about the number of active airmen, their qualifications and region. Unfortunately, they only separate out figures for the rest of the world and don't break that down into Europe and/or UK.
Using the spreadsheet for end 2020:
Table 5 lists
6,537 active private airplane pilots with an FAA licence resident outside the USTable 9 lists
1,531 Private airplane pilots with an IR outside the USIt also lists over 17,000 commercial and ATP rated pilots with an IR outside the US.
I do not know whether the 1,531 include those like me who have a piggyback 61.75 issued with an IR on the basis of my UK one, but if so I suspect there are not many.
These are WORLDWIDE figures, not UK or even Europe, but an educated guess at the number of pilots like G-BLEW who look likely to have to choose between scud running to the coast vs passing an UK Initial IR is perhaps in the low hundreds. There's the option of using a one-off validation to postpone the pain by 12 months for a CAA fee of £372 which would delay the inevitable until end 2023.
UK Flight Instructor with TB20 share at Gloucester
Post PPL flight blog