@johnh that’s for the Vol découverte but if you want to go further or for longer you can do a Vol Partagé. There is no limit as long as there is a pilot willing to pay his/her share of the flight cost.
It’s if you want to fly yourself on a one off basis it is possible to arrange a flight with instructor call it a Vol d"initiation. It is possible, if the instructor agrees to pilot the aiircraft but you would not be PIC.
It is to have the right to book the aircraft whenever you want (subject to availability) to wherever you want and with whoever you want (subject to NCO regs) that you would need to be a member of the club (and adhere to its internal regs) and in a French club this normally means also being a member of FFA.
Being a member of FFA gives you minimum assurances eg a life and disability insurance if you should have an accident, and get you and your passengers home service should you need to abandon an aircraft away from home base eg for breakdown or weather. It also provides the club with a service to get an engineer to the aircraft to fix it or in the case of weather to pay for another a pilot to go and pick up the aircraft when the weather improves. At our club, the vostbof club membership + basic FFA membership is IIRC somewhere between €200 and 240€ p.a But you can be a member of many clubs with only 1 FFA membership.
The DA40 at 155€ per hour block to block had good availability and the club committee is very flexible.
Instructor for double command is €20 ph and one is an retired airline pilot. Any pilot joining the club . Any pilot wishing to fly the club plane needs a flight with an instructor. How long that flight needs to.be is up to the instructor. Most take around an hour.
The Vol découverte or discovery flight by any club member with a PPL who has been nominated by the club to do them. To be nominated the pilot must have a minimum of 25hours in the preceding 12 months. The flight is a maximum of 30 mins.
I think the rules on this have been tightened up following a couple of crashes after Covid restrictions eased in 2021. There is a minimum take-offs and landings (6?) plus hours (3?) in the last xx number of days (30?) – or something similar…(or is it 12 & 6 in 60 days?) I remember needing to do an hour and some circuits after having been away for work for nearly a month…
Regards, SD..
@skydriller I haven’t heard of these changes but I did hear of a couple of accidents, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a tightening up.
We’ve just had a DGAC audit as a DTO so I’ll ask the club president, if I see him today, if they brought up any changes.
@gallois – it might of course be something our aeroclub has imposed on top of the rules. I do BIA flights, and I certainly wouldn’t fly youngsters if I hadn’t flown for a month, so it wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done anyway…
I understand. Like you I do BIA flights and I like to be pretty current before I take them.
I’d hate to be the one to put them off aviation.
Online booking system for training instrument approaches. None of this ringing around trying to book the right type when you need it.
Then only to find out later that the ATO puppy mill that blocked booked 2/3rds of the decided not to bother flying and the day is wasted.
Yes this is ridiculous but the FTOs are the very people who have caused this, by doing exactly what you state 
Almost no UK GA airport is so busy on the IAP that it would not be able to accommodate all “real” traffic. The perceived need to book a huge slot is probably originally driven by CAA-booked examiners needing certainty when doing their 800 quid checkride.
Whereas if you just turn up randomly, there is a > 90% chance you will get a practice ILS or whatever. This is what I do, to occassional sarcastic comments from some pompous anonymous FI or FE sitting airborne in some DA42 saying I should book like everybody else 
Whether there is any business opportunity here, I doubt.
Over here there is no need to book anything. ATC is quite accommodating, traffic allowing of course. Which means in winter prob40 you’ll be able to do what you want, free of charge. Should you ask one in summer, they will not only say no, but likely will also ask who your AME is so that they can call and report a mental health problem.
gallois wrote:
6/ And this seems to be the busiest market at the moment “aerial surveillance work”
I hopped on ferrying a C-172 back to ENRO (Røros) yesterday. I needed the hour with an FI for my PPL. She is an FI/ATPL (as well as fellow UL instructor) and had used the last 2-3 weeks flying this C-172 with a ornithologist from the university counting birds in northern Norway. Sounded like a really nice flying job, good salary, all expenses payed, and a nice place to fly.
Otherwise stuff like fire watching and SAR (the search part) are done by clubs in Norway with a normal PPL. The same goes for glider towing and also lots of sky diving pilots, at least when done in a SEP.
The “aviation related” business to get into, now and for the future, is definitely going to be drones, for IR+visible surveillance and for “dropping things”.
DJI own the surveillance market – at least the lower part of it – but given China’s lack of support for Ukraine this could be regarded as a bit dodgy, as soon as a western company sets up. It’s not as if the DJI ones were super cheap.
The obvious bit to go for is a drone which can be pointed at a target on the ground and it immediately sends you the GPS coordinates of it. This is obviously trivial if it hovers above but that’s nearly useless. You want to be at say 5000ft and 5nm away. This capability exists but AFAIK at a high price. It needs an accurate measurement of “vertical”. Image recognition capability would be a great add-on i.e. zero-in on a vehicle, or certain other objects.
