Flight Lessons At McClellan Airport

Call us or send the form and we will set the date, the instructor and the aircraft with you. The office answers Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM.

We fly every day, 7 AM to 7 PM — and from sunrise until 9 PM in summer by arrangement. We fly Saturdays and Sundays, and those slots fill first. Night lessons happen only as part of a training programme, arranged with your instructor.

How often you come back is entirely up to you if you are flying for enjoyment — once a month is fine, and nothing expires. If you are working toward something, frequency starts to matter: skills fade between flights, and a long gap means spending part of the next lesson catching up.

Lessons get moved for wind, visibility or heat. Northern California gives us a lot of flyable days, but the instructor makes the call — not you, and not a forecast app. If we cancel for weather you choose a free reschedule or a full refund, and it does not count against your two reschedules.

We are at Sacramento McClellan Airport, 3028 Peacekeeper Way, McClellan Park. Park in the guest spaces in front of the main FBO entrance, come into the lobby, and give our name at the desk.

Not a syllabus — a picture of how the early sessions usually go. The order shifts with the weather and with you.

• Lesson one — how the aeroplane feels. Straight and level flight, gentle turns, climbs and descents, and the discovery that an aeroplane is more stable and less twitchy than most people expect. You will fly most of this yourself; the instructor does the take-off and the landing.
• Lesson two or three — controlling it on purpose. Holding an altitude and a heading rather than approximately maintaining them, coordinating the rudder with the ailerons, and starting to look outside instead of at the instruments.
• Around lessons three to five — the traffic pattern. The rectangular circuit every aeroplane flies around an airport to land. You will start flying it and making approaches, with your instructor taking the last part of the landing until you do not need them to.
• Alongside all of it — radio and airspace. Talking on the radio intimidates people more than flying does, and it stops being intimidating after about four lessons.
• Landings take a while. Everybody’s do. If you are still not happy with yours at lesson ten, you are not behind — you are on schedule.

You are assigned one primary instructor and fly with them each time, with the second as backup — nobody has to re-evaluate you at the start of every lesson. You can switch without a penalty if the fit is wrong; we hand over your syllabus, endorsements and lesson notes.

Denis Vyatkin (Pilot & Owner, teaching in English and Russian) and Sergio (Certified Flight Instructor). Instruction is available in English and Russian.

Most lessons are flown in one of the four-seat, high-wing Cessnas the school owns — the IFR-equipped 172N, or the 172S with its Garmin G1000 glass panel. The two-seat Cessna 150 is the cheapest way to repeat circuits, and the Piper Seminole is the twin.

The first thing most students notice from the left seat is how much of the world you can see over a high wing in a turn.

You are not required to go anywhere with this. But if a few lessons turn into wanting the certificate, nothing restarts — the flights are already logged, your instructor already knows how you fly, and the training simply continues with a defined end point: solo, cross-country flying, the written exam, and a checkride with an FAA examiner.

The practical differences when you decide to go for it: you will need a medical certificate and a student pilot certificate before flying solo, you will start the ground study in earnest, and flying two or three times a week starts to matter for both your progress and your total cost.