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What stops the creation of a "high end" PPL school in Europe?

@Rwy20

Your comparison of Air & Compagnie (re-named AstonFly) and ACOP is way off base … so much so that it’s a joke !

Clearly, Air & Cie is EXACTLY the high-end school that Peter described in the OP. On the other-hand, ACOP is THE low-end & cheap school in the Paris area .

Air & Cie -

Fleet : Exclusively G1000 equipped, recent aircraft including almost new full de-iced Cirrus SR22s & DA42s
Infrastructure: Clean, modern & plush offices and private briefing rooms, 2 large spotless hangars with full professional handling
Staff : Uniformed professionals through-out including very attractive office staff.
Cost : €€€€

ACOP -

Fleet : A seriously clapped-out Seneca 2 that last time a saw was AOG for the last 3 moths, 3 ratty Rallyes …
Infrastructure: Looks more like a Gypsys’ squat
Staff : Mom, Dad & son .
Cost : €

BTW, I’m based at Toussus for over 20 years and know the owners of both schools well.

Last Edited by Michael at 07 Jan 12:26
FAA A&P/IA
LFPN

Michael wrote:

Your comparison of Air & Compagnie (re-named AstonFly) and ACOP is way off base

Where did i compare the two? And please state which facts specifically you don’t agree with.

All I did was to recount my personal experiences with A&C here. Maybe it works better for others, but my experience with them was exactly as stated here. I also have nothing against them and no personal interest in making anyone look good or bad here.

In my case, I was very happy at Aero Poznan, and with A&C I couldn’t even get to the stage of speaking about how to organize my training without feeling put down. Might well have been some “chemistry” issue between me and their sales person, but that is not my problem.

Edit: or did you mistake my statements about ATPL TK in my last post to be about Air&Compagnie? That post did not refer to them at all. Do they even teach ATPL?

Last Edited by Rwy20 at 07 Jan 12:45

Rwy20 wrote:

Air & Complications came in at the end of my two-day CBIR course for a sales pitch. When I contacted them while I was looking for a school to do the practical part, they acted too arrogant for me. It felt like they wanted to avoid getting my business at all cost. My questions were met with minute-long ramblings of how it is done there is the only way. For example, they would start with 35 hours of (paid) ground instruction before they would let me touch a simulator. When I asked if they could train on a Cirrus in Basel/Bâle, I was told “we don’t work abroad”. EIR? We don’t do it because it’s useless. It seemed like everything was impossible and even asking how to accommodate my wishes was an offense.

By the way, if you are in Paris and looking to do an IR, I recommend the ACOP at Toussus. They’ve been doing IR instruction for ages.

Maybe it’s me but you pretty much slammed Air & Cie and pitched ACOP whilst the OP is about, lest I remind you, ""high end" PPL school in Europe?"

At any rate, I thought that the comparison was very comical, to say the least .

Last Edited by Michael at 07 Jan 13:01
FAA A&P/IA
LFPN

is the ATPL question bank common across all EASA countries? Ie. if I go the ATPL TK route when doing the IR and I do that in Poland, are the question banks still valid?

The QB is the JAA QB but it contains a huge amount of crap and simply wrong and ambiguous questions.

Some countries have removed a lot of the crap.

The UK CAA has and I believe Germany has too.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

lenthamen wrote:

He passed the exam but gave up flying soon afterwards. Planning and executing a simple cross-country flight give him a lot of stress and he didn’t feel safe flying a SEP on his own with the family on board.

I would seriously question the competence of a school who leaves a PPL like that, and I also would have to question the motivation of the guy himself. Obviously he has not been well informed even before he started his training, nor did he inform himself about his options after he got the PPL, otherwise he would have done what many people will do if they are serious, namely to get his basic experience and go on for an IR.

lenthamen wrote:

You need a PPL/IR and a preferably a pressurized turboprop with FIKI to meet his mission profile…

PPL/IR I fully agree. FIKI Turboprop, that depends very much on the mission. Flying to Greece needs primarily a fast airplane if it should be done regularly. Again, this he could have calculated out after his first nav lesson: EHLE to Greece is between 1100 and 1400 NM Great Circle, which even most turboprops can’t do non-stop. If he went and did a PPL on that basis that he could regularly hop to his vaccation home, then he never even got the basic information he should have had for that. For this kind of mission, to go twice or three times a year, I’d think even a SR22 or possibly a Seneca II up could have done the job quite nicely, but you don’t get to fly stuff like that with a mere PPL and no experience.

It is however a sad story I do hear often. And I am afraid even though the schools may be partly responsible, it is very often the people themselfs who approach doing their pilots license with a naivity which makes me question how they succeed in other things in life. Most of these folks have businesses and are financially quite independent, yet they can’t get the information together what is involved in such trips? Somehow someone who finishes a license and does not look left nor right after that to see if that is all there is, appears to me like someone who does not take time to investigate his projects very thoroughly.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

[…] it is very often the people themselfs who approach doing their pilots license with a naivity which makes me question how they succeed in other things in life.

I can add something from personal experience here.

When I expressed my motivation for re-activating my dormant PPL I was put off by quite a few instructors. They were all professional pilots flying big and small jets. It almost appeared that to them anything smaller is not a reliable means for personal transportation. They spoke about safety and cost. Later I spoke about my motivation for doing the IR and I got similar advice. This time it was about the dangers of icing and the required dispatch rate required for business use. Probably they were thinking about their VIP clients who need to be at an important meeting to sign an important contract and cannot be 5 minutes late for that. Who knows

Had I not had prior experience and a general “let’s try it step by step” inspect & adapt attitude to all things, I would probably chucked in the PPL for good as a pure hobby thing. After all that is what I did in the past when I had no need to travel.

If I were traveling for fun and with enough disposable income to live part-time here and part-time there, the whole make-PPL-to-move-around thing would even be more relaxed than it is more for business travel.

But … it does appear that the PPL schools and their instructors are not capable of thinking outside their own world. That world seems to be that one either wants to become a pilot-for-hire (get an airline job) or fly for the sake of flying when the weather is severe CAVOK as a leisure activity. The huge world in between nobody seems to see.

I also asked about the idea to bring the aircraft to me and do training while traveling around. Nobody wanted. They prefer to be home at night. I now know a freelance instructor who works in a non-aviation day job who would certainly do all kinds of things. But once there is a school with schedules etc. involved there is an issue. They did talk me out of it and I went through the program quickly and now I’m learning the rest on my own.

Inspect & Adapt is a good way for dealing with complexity in all forms. So a license to learn makes that possible. But you do need some determination. Nobody can give it to you unless you already have it. You can make a lot of money with a few simple “tricks” and with a good portion of luck (be in the right place at the right time) but then you might not have the stamina for working through all those issues.

I don’t believe there is a market for such a PPL school as this thread is about. But I believe there is a market for freelance instructors teaching students who bring their own flying platform.

On a German forum there was a post by a Hungarian who was living in Italy and wanted to see his girlfriend in Hungary more often than driving back and forth would allow him. So he set out to make his PPL in an SR22. He bought 1/2 share and got instruction in some sort of mix between learn the basics and then en-route training. I don’t know what happened later on. He never posted but he did post two times with details.

Frequent travels around Europe

Michael wrote:

Maybe it’s me but you pretty much slammed Air & Cie and pitched ACOP whilst the OP is about, lest I remind you, ""high end" PPL school in Europe?"

At any rate, I thought that the comparison was very comical, to say the least

At least I made you laugh. But again, it wasn’t a comparison. You know, sometimes discussions that span 5 pages take turns, so I started out writing about my experience with Aero Poznan, which pretty much fits the bill of what was discussed here. Then someone brought up Air & Compagnie, and since I was originally pretty much decided to do my training there and then finally didn’t, I thought I’d share my experience and reasons here. And then, equally out of personal experience, I added a tip for fellow pilots looking for IFR training in the area, which already seems to have benefited one person.

Actually after I spoke to Air et Compagnie I was pretty disappointed that my plan to do my training with them had fallen apart, and that is why I decided to become member at PPL/IR, where I got the recommendation about Aero Poznan. Now I’m really happy it turned out that way, but at the time I was really set to spend my money there and they convinced me not to. That takes a bit of effort I think, and it explains my reaction and views.

ACOP really doesn’t do any marketing, and they could care less about running around in uniforms and impressing anyone. That’s actually what makes them sympathetic to me, because I have learnt not to judge a book by its cover. But if you know the owner of A&C for 20 years, then it makes it understandable why you wouldn’t accept criticism of their school, because you have a different perspective. Mind you, I don’t know if their training is good or bad, but I think that is clear from what I wrote.

Last Edited by Rwy20 at 07 Jan 23:12

Stephan_Schwab wrote:

It almost appeared that to them anything smaller is not a reliable means for personal transportation.

It is as reliable as you are. Please do not get this the wrong way, it is not meant to be condescending.

I actually believe that their sentiment (even if they put it across in a bad way) is correct. Myself not even being an FI (just can’t justify the 12k EUR cost right now), if I were to instruct I would very much highlight the fact over and over again to my students that the average SEP plane is recreational and not suited for scheduled A to B transportation operations. I do believe that there is a certain mindset that can be indoctrinated into pilots, and this strongly comes from the peers that train and surround them during their aviation “career”.

I know flight schools that hook financially potent clients into PPL training by talking about “flying your personal plane to your vacation spot, impress your family and friends etc..”. Sure, this sounds very appealing. Who wouldn’t want to overfly the major traffic jams on the Autobahns during the summer holidays. But theres also the frequent case where the weather is marginal – and the hotel is already booked and paid. Or the rented aircraft HAS TO BE back at the home base. And people press on with their flights, and they die. Because a SEP is not as reliable a means of transportation as a multi engined commercial or private turboprop/jet.

Reading Peters trip reports, the amount of thought, planning and preparation he puts into his longer x-countries easily exceeds some commercial airlines dispatch office and cannot be compared to the average PPL who rents a plane.

I knew a great guy, very successful (rich), bit of an overachiever and a little risky in his behavior. He was the best “customer” at his flying club, spending a couple hundred thousand euros in training and renting there. He would boast that he took off in a SEP during low vis overcast conditions, and he would fly the MEP single pilot in very thick IMC conditions frequently. When I asked what he would do if the engine quit after take off he looked at me like he’d seen an alien. He would fly on his schedule, not thinking twice about going or not going due to WX or other factors – “I fly the best horse in the house”. In order to not stop the money flowing, none of the clubs instructors and examiners shared their feelings with him, that he was pushing the outside of the envelope and that it was just a matter of time till something would happen. Well, it took another year and sure thing it happened, together with his own child and another close relative.

Another local pilot took almost his entire family with him when he embarked on a very disputed flight surrounded by vacation plans and dropping kids at the grandparents house under marginal WX conditions.

I think there would be a market for consulting services towards future pilots on applying a safety oriented mindset during their training and flying. This “business” would be very much scalable, from training the fresh PPL in his newly bought Cirrus up to very rich people who can afford a private Jet and out of sheer ignorance pressure themselves (as owner pilots) or some underpaid freelance pilots into landing somewhere below minimum “because I paid a few million for this thing”. Paying a couple million to end up somewhere in a smoking hole is a very sad contradiction. It could even be a mobile entity (train the customer where he wants to be trained, fly with him where he wants to fly) and you could partner up with aircraft manufacturers to offer the services when someone pulls the trigger on a new plane.

always learning
LO__, Austria

Stephan_Schwab wrote:

But … it does appear that the PPL schools and their instructors are not capable of thinking outside their own world. That world seems to be that one either wants to become a pilot-for-hire (get an airline job) or fly for the sake of flying when the weather is severe CAVOK as a leisure activity. The huge world in between nobody seems to see.

That pretty much sums up the blank stares I got when I told my Club/School that I intended to buy a plane for serious traveling around Europe, over 20 years ago.

FAA A&P/IA
LFPN

Snoopy,

Your post and the one of Stephan are not so much in contradiction.

When you say that the basic PPL with a DA20 or C172 is not sufficient for business travelling, then I would obviously agree.

But what Stephan says is that with the PPL, and after expanding on that knowledge, with some experience thrown in and a proper aircraft, one can reach a point were “90%” reliability (which is sufficient for many people) can be reached.

Also, a plain 172 and Stephan’s SR22 (310hp, 200 knots, turbo, parachute, FIKI, oxygen, data link weather) are not even remotely comparable. The latter is three classes above. It’s more comparable to what was say a C414 twenty years ago. Nobody would have said you can’t use that for some serious travel.

To say PPL = no good for business flying (which would be absurd) and to promulgate that would be yet another but major nail in the coffin of GA. People like Stephan support our infrastructure (airports, aircraft manufacturers, maintenance companies) like few others.

Sure, it cots a lot of money, but the truth is that many people earn enough to make it make sense nevertheless.

Last Edited by boscomantico at 08 Jan 07:43
Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany
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