What does this mean? It means the consumer plays an important part in controlling the cost. For example, you tell the flight school that you will take lessons 3 times each week and that you have the time to study 10 hours a week. Then the school offers an estimated price of $5,000 for some kind of a package. Then, three weeks later, you get that big promotion or find out that you are going to be a parent and flight lessons drop back to once a week or sometimes you skip a week. What happens to the cost? Well, it goes up and takes longer. One year later you still are taking lessons, the cost is now at $6,000 and you are saying “what happened here?” This happens all the time in flight training. As I said, it’s a partnership between you and your training provider.

This is one reason that some people will opt for what is called accelerated flight training, which is full time and focused. You take an “aviation vacation” and  immerse yourself in the effort of getting your certificate or rating. There are some advantages in accelerated flight training and some disadvantages; you can read about those in my article on this Web site. When it comes to cost, the consumer must take the time to determine exactly how the cost is being quoted to understand the difference between programs. There can be a huge difference between programs, even at the same school.

We have school on our field that quotes $3,295 for the Private Pilot's License (even though it’s a certificate not a license, but that’s another story) and there is simply no way you can do that in San Diego or most other cities for that price. The price is based on using a two-seat airplane and 40 hours of total flying time, the FAA minimum for the Private Pilot Certificate, even though the national average is 70 hours! Do you really want the lowest bidder when it comes to getting in an airplane and flying your family somewhere? I don’t. I tend to get emotional when I see prices for $2,250, $4,195 and so on being advertised to the public for a Private Pilot Certificate. What happens to all those future pilots when they run out of money and never finish flight training? My concern is that they become bitter against flight schools, flight instructors and general aviation. What I hear often from those would-be pilots is something like “I was ripped off” by XYZ Flight School.

While there are not any marketing secrets that I know about at flight schools, the one thing that you should know is that most flight schools are struggling to stay alive, and most don’t make money! Many flight schools and instructors do this because they love it, not because they are making any real money at it. While you might think that's a good deal for you, think again. Every month I hear of a flight school that goes out of business and in most cases they take the customers' deposits and dreams with them.

Just recently, a school in Florida went out of business and left more than 300 students stranded. The school took their money with them, and some students had just paid $40,000 for a professional pilot course. I suggest that you do not pay up front with large deposits except for accelerated courses that occur in less than 30 days. Don’t offer to finance the flight school's business; let them go to the bank like everyone else. And you thought shopping for a cell phone was complicated!

Getting the lowdown on actual cost and effort is so complicated that I actually offer a 2-hour free seminar every month called Learning to Fly, which always attracts people who are thinking about learning to fly. And we always run over into another hour! Listed below are some of the issues that reflect the total cost of learning to fly:

How many lessons per week you take; your available time to study while not at the airport; the distance to the practice area from your airport of choice; the experience level of your flight instructor; the nature of your local weather in which lessons should not occur; if your flight instructor actually follows a syllabus; what type of airplane you learn in; who pays for the insurance and the quality of the insurance. Those are just a few of the issues. Just reading the items above, you can see how hard it is to figure out the impact of the related cost of those items.

For example, at my airport and most others in major cities you will spend 12-18 minutes of time just getting to the practice area. If we take those times 25 lessons you end up with more than 6 hours of time. When the FAA came up with the 40 hours of required training I would bet you that the practice areas were closer – our cities have grown a lot! The fact is flight training for the Private will cost anywhere from $5,500  to $10,000 depending on if you use a two-seat 1970 airplane or a 2002 Cessna 172. Flight training is not really an item where you can shop by price. I used to offer one-day private and one-day instrument “refresher” courses and in 70% of the cases the pilots came from a “school” that offered a course at a cheap price. In other words, the pilot was still trying to get all the facts to be a safe pilot and have fun. It’s a simple fact that the more you know, the more fun it is.

Life is good – be a pilot!

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