The People Who Will Teach You To Fly

Search for a flight school and Google offers the question everyone is quietly asking: is it true that eighty per cent of flight students quit. We cannot verify that figure and will not repeat it as a fact. What we can describe is the part of it a school controls.

A student who changes instructor three times pays for it twice. Each new instructor needs an hour or two in the air to see for himself where you actually are, and each one teaches the same landing in a slightly different order. Do that often enough and progress stops being visible — which is usually the point at which somebody stops booking.

So you are given one instructor and you keep him to the certificate. That is possible here because the school is two people and one of them owns it: nobody is moved to fill a gap in a roster, because there is no roster.

• You are never handed to whoever is free that morning.
• Changing instructor is your call, it is free, and your written records go with you.
• If yours is away, the other flies with you and hands you back. That is cover, not a reassignment.

You are assigned one primary instructor, and the other is your backup when schedules or illness get in the way.

• Changing instructor is allowed and free. If the fit is wrong, say so.
• Denis talks through the reason, checks the other instructor has capacity, and hands over your syllabus, your endorsements and your lesson notes.
• Nothing about your progress is lost, and nothing is charged for the switch.
• Progress is written down: a written syllabus with lesson grades and stage reviews, logged in Flight Schedule Pro.
• A handover is therefore a transfer of records rather than a fresh start.

Flight education is $110 an hour, and that is the whole rate — the aircraft and your instructor together, with fuel and oil included. There is no separate instructor charge to add to it.

Time is billed for what you actually use, in the air and on the ground, from the start of the planned briefing to the end of the debrief. A typical lesson adds 0.3–0.5 hours of ground time to the flight.

Between them they cover the whole ladder taught here: private pilot, instrument, commercial, the CFI and CFII instructor certificates, and multi-engine training in the Piper Seminole.

Sergio takes most primary students through the private pilot certificate, along with flight reviews and instrument proficiency checks. Denis oversees the commercial, instructor and multi-engine stages.

Two instructors is the whole school, and it is a choice rather than a shortage. These are its limits, so you can weigh them before you book rather than meet them in week three.

• Two diaries, not twelve. Evening and weekend-morning slots go first, and a standing weekly booking is how to hold the time you want.
• We cannot put four students in the air at once. When both instructors are flying, the answer is another time, not another instructor.
• No Part 141 course, no cadet pipeline, no visa sponsorship. Part 61 suits an adult fitting flying around a job; it does not suit somebody who needs an approved course for an M-1 visa or a sponsored airline pathway.
• The checkride examiner is not us. You fly it with an FAA-designated examiner from outside the school and pay them directly; the rate card says what that costs.
• Hour building outside your own training is rental rather than instruction, and it is rented rather than taught: $120 an hour wet after a checkout, no instructor in the seat. The aircraft fly with our students first, so availability is the thing to ask about before you plan around it.