Renting An Aircraft At McClellan

Three things stand between the phone call and the keys: a checkout flight with one of our instructors, a look at your certificate, medical and logbook, and the renter requirements that apply to the aircraft you want. None of that is unusual — every operator at every field around Sacramento asks for a version of the same three.

The terms are the same for everybody, so here they are rather than on request: $120 an hour wet, a one-hour minimum, a private pilot certificate as the floor, a $500 refundable deposit held against the booking, and a pilot who meets the insurance requirements for the aircraft. How long your checkout runs is the one part that depends on you — on the aeroplane and on what you have been flying lately.

A checkout is a flight with an instructor beside you in the aircraft you intend to rent. It is not an examination of whether you can fly. It is how the school sees how you fly, and how you meet the things particular to this aeroplane and this airport — the fuel system, the panel actually fitted to it, the pattern at McClellan and the airspace stacked above the valley.

It is flown as dual, which is what our $110 an hour covers: the aircraft and the instructor together, with aviation fuel and oil in it. How long it takes depends on how current you are and how far the type sits from what you already fly — somebody who flies a 172 most months and somebody returning after three years are not the same checkout.

Bring the paperwork to the checkout and the whole thing is one visit rather than two.

• Your pilot certificate.
• Your medical certificate, current for the flying you intend to do.
• A government-issued photo ID.
• Your logbook, showing your flight review and the last time you flew the type.
• Your renter’s insurance policy, if you carry one — and ask us about it on the call if you do not.

Renting sits on top of the regulations rather than instead of them. A flight review inside the last 24 calendar months. Three take-offs and landings in the previous 90 days before you carry a passenger, and three at night to a full stop before you carry one after dark. Instrument currency inside the last six months if you intend to file.

If any of that has lapsed, the answer is a flight rather than a refusal: an hour or two of dual puts the flight review in your logbook and the landings behind you, at the same $110 an hour, and the checkout can be flown in the same visit.

Published rates at the other Sacramento-area fields run from roughly $120 to $220 an hour for a four-seat Cessna, wet — fuel included, instructor not. Club membership takes $15 an hour off some of them, and a few dollars an hour towards an insurance deductible fund is common on top of the rate.

Ours is $120 an hour wet — fuel included, no instructor — which sits at the bottom of that range rather than in the middle of it. Instruction is a separate and different number: $110 an hour with the instructor already in it, which is what a checkout or a flight review is billed at. Compare a rental rate against a rental rate, and note that a school charging $150 for the aeroplane and $70 for the instructor is asking $220 for the hour a checkout takes.

The fuel arrangement is the same one our students fly under. Refuel away from McClellan and we credit the fuel at our current price per gallon against your receipt; anything above that price is yours.

Possible, and it is a scheduling conversation rather than a booking form. This is a training fleet first: regular students hold a repeating weekly slot, weekends go first, and maintenance is scheduled around the diary — an aeroplane that is away for two days is two days of lessons it is not flying.

So tell us the dates when you call, and as early as you can. The hourly minimum on an ordinary booking is one hour; an aeroplane held overnight is priced against a daily minimum instead — a set number of hours a day whether you fly them or not — and that is worth settling before you plan the trip around it rather than after.

The aircraft are insured. That policy exists to protect the aircraft and the school, and it is not the same thing as protecting you: rent anywhere and the deductible, and your own liability, are usually yours. That is what a non-owned aircraft policy is for, and plenty of renters carry one. Some operators require it; others charge a few dollars an hour into a deductible fund instead.

Here you must meet the insurance requirements for the aircraft you are renting, and the $500 deposit is held against the booking rather than charged — it comes back when the aeroplane does. What our own cover includes, and exactly what you are asked to carry, is worth settling on the same call as the checkout rather than after something happens.

Building time towards a commercial certificate is rental work. Adding to what you hold is not: an instrument rating, the commercial certificate, CFI and CFII, or the multi-engine rating and the MEI in the Piper Seminole are all flown with an instructor beside you, at the same $110 an hour, and that is the part of this school a rated pilot uses most.

One instructor takes you through it rather than whoever is free that week, which matters more on a rating than it does on a rental.

This is not rental and it is not charged as rental. Solo flight is part of your course: you fly the aircraft on your own once the solo is the next step in your syllabus, you hold the current endorsements the FAA requires, and your instructor has authorised that specific flight in writing.

That covers your first solo, solo practice in the local area, and the solo cross-countries a private certificate calls for — all planned with your instructor and flown on the school’s aircraft at the usual hourly rate.