"Beav" wrote in message
...

"I"? I thought this was for your friend? :-)) Anyway, the simple answer is
"Lots". Over here in the UK, we'd expect to pay around 15,000 GBP (around
30
grand US) just for starters.

£15k will get you the PPL easily, but bear in mind he's asking about how
much it would cost before he could start earning from it.

Considering the two popular routes available, instructing or straight to
charter, the costs would be more like:

£13,000 PPL
£27,500 to build up to 155 hours
£9,000 to complete CPL
£20,000 to build up to 250 hours (which I think is the new legal min for
instructing)
£9,000 to do instructor course.

So, that's £80k just to earn about £25k a year, if you're lucky as an
instructor.

Or,

£45,000 to do full-time study and training up to CPL.
£30,000 to do IFR on a twin-turbine.

Of course with this option you still wont find work unless the North Sea
operators get desperate and hire you as a co-pilot, though at 53 that's
very, very unliekly I'm afraid. (£35k starting salary seems to be in the
ball-park these days.) No one else is going to hire you to fly their
turbine helis with so little hours as a single-pilot captain, unless you're
*extremely* lucky or well connected.

Put bluntly, it's a joke. It'll take the length of a full career just to
make your money back, not forgetting you'll likely need to spend a good deal
more on type conversions just to make yourse'f more marketable. I can think
of no other career that costs so much to do and returns so little. If you
look towards doing training in the US or South Africa you can pretty much
half all those costs.

Si