I don’t mean it in a bad way at all.
Excellent facilities, good mix of instructors and examiners, nicely maintained aircraft and all in house.
Of course you pay for it, especially with associated regional airport overheads.
There’s a PPL and IR School in my city that is expensive. They provide SR20, SR22, and full motion SR22 simulator. Price for PPL in a Cirrus is about 2x what one would pay at a different school. Every year they get a fresh fully loaded SR22 to replace the “old one”. Students come mostly from abroad.
Aero Poznan
Edit: just noticed that it was mentioned by others..
Rwy20 wrote:
The way it would work in the US is that the target group that you describe would buy their own plane and hire an experienced instructor. Not possible in the EU.
Why not? That’s how I got my IR. Only thing to do was get the aircraft in CAMO and sign an agreement allowing the school to use it.
Yes; it is possible.
For example I did my FAA IR to JAA IR conversion in my own N-reg plane, out of Shoreham EGKA, in 2011.
The problem is that many or most FTOs don’t want that type of business. Some won’t touch you even if you offer to ram money down their throat. The ATPL training outfits especially just want to do their standard package. My guess is that you are limited to maybe 10-20% of FTOs. And this introduces practical issues because you have to live somewhere during the training. Already most people don’t live within an easy driving distance of an FTO (say 1hr or less, otherwise you will be too tired to fly that day) so have to stay in a hotel. Throw in the 10-20% figure and you are looking at hotel residence for most. It’s not too bad for the mostly very young ATPL students but most people who are doing this for private flying hate living out of a hotel, and the disruption to their private life.
In the USA, you do your PPL at your local school, then come back for the IR, then maybe come back for the CPL, then maybe come back for the ATP. All in the same school, probably with the same instructor, and all of it can be done anything up to 100% freelance so you never actually have to hang out at a school. This translates to a hugely higher accessibility of pilot training at all levels, and Europe cannot even approach this because they have tied everything down to an organisational approval (=€€€€ for the national CAAs). Freelance training used to be possible; I have read a book of an account of such. Maybe 30 years ago.
Price is not all that important. Anybody who is actually going to hang around in GA long-term cannot possibly care that much whether it costs 8k, 10k or 12k. It’s the hassle that makes it or breaks it. The price affects competition between schools, and it affects how many “casual” people turn up, and for sure the “casual” students make up a big % of the business. But most of them drop out immediately they get the PPL. So there is a nice elitist statement for you 
10 K is what i costs today if you do it in the existing schools. Do the whole PPL in a nice SR22, fly abroad with your student … and it will be more like 30 K.
Here is a student who solo’ed in a Cirrus – probably did the whole PPL in the Cirrus
I know a guy (successful real estate investor) that has a holiday home in Greece and he started the PPL training as he wanted to fly to Greece once or twice a year.
His training was an increasing disillusionment with the school teaching dead reckoning navigation and discouraging IFR flight. 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 think that if the flight school would have been fair right from the start he might not have started in the first place. You need a PPL/IR and a preferably a pressurized turboprop with FIKI to meet his mission profile…
If I got a penny every time I heard a story like that I would be flying a TBM700 with roughly 1800hrs (half life) on the engine
You need a PPL/IR and a preferably a pressurized turboprop with FIKI to meet his mission profile…
Not if you want to do it only once or twice a year. I reckon you could fly N Europe to Greece 50x to 100x a year, in a non-TKS TB20. Especially if you do what I do for long trips: set aside 2 or 3 consecutive days for getting out of N Europe.
If you want to fly on business and doing “formal customer visits” then yes you need a TP or similar, for the required ~99% despatch rate.
But you also need good airports at both ends… Shoreham is not much good because the 800ft MDA on 20 means that at least 50% of cancelled or diverted flights are due to the “home” end. A cowboy can get into Shoreham 20 in OVC004 and many do… but I won’t do that sort of thing anymore. People flying between ILS airports with good opening hours instantly get a big jump in despatch rates. There is a famous ex owner of a 421C who documented a 98% despatch rate, between Bournemouth and various big ILS airports like Rome, on business, one flight per week.
“10 K is what i costs today if you do it in the existing schools”
At a school local to me its about 6 grand in their cessna 150’s and just over 8 grand in their slingsby T67
I think people would pay 20k for the sort of PPL I suggested but the problem is that they don’t know they need one to do what they are wanting to do.
At that stage in one’s training one knows almost nothing about how the PPL training maps onto mission capability, what sort of planes and what sort of equipment has what capability, etc.
That may actually be the reason why attempts to do a “high end” school have not worked. The concept is very difficult to market because such marketing would require a lot of potential customer education, as well as putting out a lot of negativity around the competition.
I think a 6k PPL is possible only at a place which has almost zero landing fees, and maybe volunteer or very low paid instructors. And it must assume 45hrs and all extras are extra. Back in 2002 I recall some schools (e.g. the long-defunct one I hung out at for a bit) who paid 10 quid a day retainer and 10 quid a flying hour. That would be regarded as outrageous today, I am sure. Oddly enough the current rates I have heard of on the French “club” scene are similar – 10-20 euros an hour and zero retainer!
