Whether one works for free or for 20 Euros an hour (like in many other places in Europe) does not make much difference. Your motivation must come from elsewhere.
johnh wrote:
That´s bloody cheap!Remember that in France flight instructors at the aeroclubs work for nothing. Yes honestly. It blew me away too, but it’s a long standing tradition.
So flight instructors are doing it for the pleasure, which should be good (not sure about the quality – but I suppose good enough for PPL training?), and you get easier access to aviation for students. Lovely!
maxbc wrote:
Next goal is to find the best price for a BIR with the same quality standard.
Best of luck!
@Steve6443 It’s a neat idea to have a breakdown of the costs. Especially making the breakdown available on the platform. Just a basic description, like what is maintenance, what is fuel, or rental. It makes it very easy to check: other pilots may browse the platform and notice unreasonable numbers, which would decrease the number of pilots attempting it. It’s much harder to increase prices and make money off a flight if you’re actually describing what you pay for. The rules say you can only bill equal shares of fuel, maintenance, rental, and possibly engine reserves, all of which are very easy to estimate and hard to inflate substantially.
The few flights I’ve seen on wingly, prices were pretty high if you consider that the pilot is paying for his seat (not sure but I think 300€/h on a TB20 is a little much for fuel / maintenance alone) and a breakdown of cost would certainly help in determining where it’s been inflated. Or those ads would disappear, but it means they are breaking the rules anyway, so no regrets there.
And yeah unequal shares should really not be allowed. And obviously you should not have any business affiliation with the renter, when applicable.
maxbc wrote:
Not established does not mean not relevant
I chose my wording carefully and that was not it: I said it in the affirmative: it is established that there is no evidence that the cost-sharing nature of this flight had any relevance on the outcome.
172driver wrote:
nobody here can tell me that he wasn’t under considerable pressure to go
…or the oppositte for that matter. Zero factual evidence has been posted herein about such a link. One could feel more (or less) pressed for a flight on his own for a business matter, or with the family for an important encounter, or with a friend for an important meeting, or for currency expiration or whatever reason where I want to rush it to beat wx to my destination. Hence the ridesharing link is pure speculation. We know of @jgmusic and quite a few others who had no such arrangement but for other reasons were pressed into making fatally wrong decisions flying in the mountains.
I wonder who in the GA community (including the sadly deceased pax) is being helped by the disproportionate and speculative focus on the ridesharing arrangement in this thread. I would suggest most of those discssions would however make sense for example in this thread on ridesharing arrangements.
On the contrary, we know for a that fact that mountains, weather, performance , and I venture to say, published pilot attitude, were relevant risk factors on the OP flight.
Yeager wrote:
So flight instructors are doing it for the pleasure, which should be good (not sure about the quality – but I suppose good enough for PPL training?), and you get easier access to aviation for students. Lovely!
In a large part, they are doing it for pleasure. I think some also want to build time. They are basically paid (more like defrayed) ~30€ per flight hour. So you can come, do a 45min briefing (an actual personal teaching lesson most of the time), 15min aircraft prep, 45min flight and 15min debrief, and the instructor gets “paid” 20€. Sometimes they even come to the field just for one person during the day.
In general I think it’s a good system. It’s very good to have no economic pressure from a school wanting to bill you. It’s also a good thing that most instructors are here because they love teaching, which makes for a pleasant time. There’s a whole atmosphere of gratuity which leaves room for maximum safety considerations. And if you’re lucky like myself, you end up with someone highly competent and professional (a ~20k hours airline PIC with a history of lobbying for a particular safety topic in the airline world).
Mileage may vary though. I see some much more reckless instructors from other clubs, doing 45° turns 200ft over the runway. As for the atmosphere, I would guess (and have heard that) the bigger the club is, the less people care about common things, and behavior can quickly become selfish. In my club a guy does refills of the mogas tank at a gas station about every week, I don’t think he gets paid to do that. In a bigger club, this action and subsequent gratitude would get swallowed by efficiency considerations and a steady stream of pilots coming just to fly, who barely know eachother.
In general I think it’s a good system.
I guess it has its good points, but its bad ones too. In the US I was used to working with high-time professional instructors who did it from choice as a living. Typically in CA they were charging $80-100 /hour (more now) but they were worth it.
In French aeroclubs what you get is either low-ish time people on their way to the airlines, who are doing it out of necessity, or retired people – some ex-airline but in my experience more often just keen amateur pilots who’ve done the instructor qualifications to make retirement more interesting. Mostly I’ve been happy with the ones I’ve flown with. By far the worst I’ve encountered was ex-AF with 10,000 or so hours. My first instructor in France, you could only fly with in the afternoon – in the morning he worked in a sandwich shop to pay the bills.
There are also professional outfits like Orbifly where you pay US-like rates – and in my experience you get US-like quality of instruction too. But they’re not that common and you only find them at a handful of airports.
They are basically paid (more like defrayed) ~30€ per flight hour.
First I heard of that. I have always heard them described as “bénévole” – a fancy word for “free” or “doing it for nothing”.
What is produced in the marketing dream machine pay2fly sausage factories is rote learning and company profit. Pay 100k to click multiple choice question banks, and get 150 “flight” hours (as cheaply as possible to produce for the ATO so the profit margin is hefty). Then be dropped into the sharktank of LCC airline assessment and recruitment. My connections at airlines tell me the standard is steadily going down hill, and extension line training due to inability for basic flying, is frequent. The extreme cases weed out, and even the worst pilots make the cut as the system is set up for it, so it has little safety consequences (maybe in a few years it will show). It’s pay2play until landing a job at the airlines, then it’s pay2play with a safety management system.
Probably worth diverting to another thread, but surprised at this blanket statement, blimey! comes to mind.
The fATPL integrated training industry is a loss leader to ensure the big Commercial Air Transport and Turbine recurrent training providers, have a training footprint at all stages of the process. The profitable part of the business is recurrent type and line training in full motion simulators. It doesn’t take too much accounting knowledge to figure out the basic training is break even, probably loss making across the industry at full accounting charges (ie depreciation, resilience proofing).
At the moment the Airline, Cargo and Corporate operators still appreciate that their recruits have been exposed to a fairly high quota of MEP/IR single crew training and flying. The MEP/IR is still a reasonably high practical test standard, although integrated schools achieve quite high pass rates.
The course then includes MCC/APS, this used to be a relative formality, but today the APS requires meeting standards on the course.
There is wash out on these courses at all stages.
There is also a quality feedback loop between the airlines and the schools, with the airlines able to drill down on training records. The quality of the integrated school creates a reinforcing barrier to entry with certain airlines, which in turn prioritise cadets from certain schools.
In addition A-UPRT before type rating has modernised what used to be very informal, and unstructured UPRT training. To say some of the old courses were superannuated jet jocks doing tail chases in Extras is not an exaggeration.
Fifty years ago the industry was designed to send a newly minted pilot into a Navajo single crew job in lousy IFR, usually at night, with VOR/ADF at the heart of the system where they paid their dues.
Today the industry recruits have a much more structured path, and in my experience the quality of the cadets has in general improved. I would suggest the big recruiters are also feeling the product is more consistent.
You have to go back to WW2 to find under 25 year olds getting CAT command with probably the best safety standards in history of commercial aviation.
Probably worth diverting to another thread
I can’t do that because
I split off posts into new threads if it work be easy, but really I am not any better at starting new threads than any other reasonably intelligent poster 
The difference is motivation…
