Flight school implementing some pretty harsh new rules

FLYGUYRY

FLYGUYRY

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Ryan_M
So, my flight school just implemented a bunch of new rules which I think are pretty ridiculous but I wanted to get everyone else's opinion before I start looking elsewhere. I am a private pilot just about finished with my instrument rating. The new rental rules say that as a private pilot I can only travel a maximum distance of 100nm away (wtf) and can only fly a XC if the ceiling is at least 4000 feet and visibility is 8nm (wtf2). As an instrument rated pilot I can fly a whopping (gasp) 150nm with a minimum ceiling of 800 feet.

Now, I am still a young 83 hour TT pilot and there are plenty of flights I would not yet attempt, that being said I feel like being limited to 100nm is really excessive and it's making me think I should look elsewhere. Is this normal? Do any of you guys see these types of limitations? I feel like I am a student pilot again or something :(
 
Was there an incident that preceded these new rules?

It does seem pretty excessive.
 
Yeah I suppose I could look elsewhere for rental or a club, problem is (I forgot to mention) I'm using my GI Bill so if I do only rent somewhere else it would be out of my pocket which seems sort of silly. I guess I just need to look around more but I can't recall ever seeing limitations put on renters once you have your ticket.
 
I wonder if they're just covering their arses or they'll strictly enforce it. If one of my local places pulled that I'd let them know why I was going elsewhere.
 
Ryanb said:
Was there an incident that preceded these new rules?

It does seem pretty excessive.
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So, I guess in a way there was? There have been two incidents lately, one of which involved a student pilot somehow taxiing into not one, not two, but three civil air patrol aircraft destroying one of my schools planes and 2 CAP planes (the third seriously damaged) in the process. Don't ask, I have no idea how that is possible and the new rules wouldn't have stopped that from happening.

The other, which really wasn't an incident but just an inconvenience, was another private pilot who is in my instrument class now (good guy, knows his stuff) went up to NYC to get some food, took off and had a CO2 warning go off in the plane so he turned around to land and get it checked out, by the time it was able to get looked at weather rolled in and the AC had to remain in Teterboro overnight. The owner was pretty ****ed about that and I'm not exactly sure why as he certainly made the right call in turning back AND remaining there instead of trying to take off in marginal conditions at night.
 
My flight school has a rule for student pilots stay within 25 nm of the home base for ppl. No idea about instrument. Think that 25 nm is pretty standard. And they require u to have flight following and active flight plan on your xc. For renting, someone just took my favorite bird to Seattle for a week

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FLYGUYRY said:
Yeah I suppose I could look elsewhere for rental or a club, problem is (I forgot to mention) I'm using my GI Bill so if I do only rent somewhere else it would be out of my pocket which seems sort of silly. I guess I just need to look around more but I can't recall ever seeing limitations put on renters once you have your ticket.
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You're using the GI Bill to cover rental cost?
 
weilke said:
Owner sounds like an idiot.
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...an idiot who does not want to deal with the hassle of renting planes too far from his base when crap goes wrong...which it will.

You are not gonna win that battle.

Finish up training flights with their rules but go get checked out at another FBO for rental flights.
 
I'd rent elsewhere. If you don't abide by it and have a problem outside the new "rules" you may find yourself in trouble with insurance.
 
FLYGUYRY said:
GI Bill covers any flight I take since it counts towards PIC time and time towards my commercial
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Ok. I was under the impression it covers training time to obtain a certificate.
 
WannFly said:
My flight school has a rule for student pilots stay within 25 nm of the home base for ppl.
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That's standard across the board.

@FLYGUYRY It sounds to me like the owner doesn't want to risk his airplane(s) breaking too far from base or be inconvenienced if it's not available when he wants it. Pretty strange, as that's how the game works and part of the chance you take having your airplane on leaseback.
 
I'd take my money elsewhere. Or Uncle Sam's money. Doesn't matter. Same deal. Cut off the money, they'll think harder about why they rent airplanes.
 
Velocity173 said:
Ok. I was under the impression it covers training time to obtain a certificate.
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Yeah it does, but you get to use it for random flights if you want as long as it can count towards a rating which, in most cases it counts towards your 190 TT needed for commercial. Also the GI bill pays out a set amount to the school for each rating (10,200 for example for my private) but ended up getting it done for about 8K. You can't get that money refunded back you can only use it for flights so between my leftover private and likely couple grand leftover from instrument, not much else you can do with it but fly :)
 
Shawn said:
...an idiot who does not want to deal with the hassle of renting planes too far from his base when crap goes wrong...which it will.

You are not gonna win that battle.

Finish up training flights with their rules but go get checked out at another FBO for rental flights.
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Yeah, I do understand his concerns, at the same time like RyanB said, it is part of the business if you ask me and if you aren't willing to risk that happening occasionally then perhaps you shouldn't own a flight school? I dunno, it does suck because my instructors are great and most of them have said I am preaching to the choir when I voiced my concerns to them about this.
 
WannFly said:
My flight school has a rule for student pilots stay within 25 nm of the home base for ppl. No idea about instrument. Think that 25 nm is pretty standard. And they require u to have flight following and active flight plan on your xc. For renting, someone just took my favorite bird to Seattle for a week

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk
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FAR 61.93. It's the FAA, not the school.

Bob
 
Some owners are that way. We have a 182 at our school, lots of glass inside, so owner spent good amount of money on it. That has a restriction of solo, u can only get complex and HP dual instruction in it, u can't solo in it. Donno about if u can rent it though for 1500nm xc

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ugh; that sucks. It's unreasonable but sadly not all that uncommon (although this does seem more extreme than most). It's not about safety; it's about economics. Most flight schools make far more money from instruction than rental. That $50/hr you're paying for instruction? The CFI gets about $15 of it. The rest is pure margin. Flight schools can't screw aircraft owners (the schools rarely own the aircraft) as badly, so the margins are much narrower. As a consequence, they HATE it when a renter has a plane that could've been booked for instruction. A lot of flight schools have rules like this to discourage rentals. It has noting to do with safety, except perhaps preventing the owner from having a heart attack because a renter got stranded somewhere due to weather for a day.

Another common one is "oh, the insurance company requires 15 hours of dual in that 182 before you can rent it." Call their insurer sometime and ask about that. :) The real reason is that the owner wants to line his pockets with 15 hours of dual before letting you "waste" the plane for solo flights.

Clubs, partnerships, and ownership are really the only ways to go if you want to fly to go places. Renting just sucks, and IMHO it's a big reason for the student drop rate once people learn how incredibly useless flight school rentals are for actually going anywhere.

One thing you could do is look at openairplane.com. They charge more, but they're 100% focused on providing go-place rentals. Their checkout seems somewhat extreme, but at least you don't have to deal with flight school BS. I've thought about getting checked out so I can go flying when I travel commercially to the east coast or Hawaii, but I've yet to get around to it.
 
WannFly said:
Some owners are that way. We have a 182 at our school, lots of glass inside, so owner spent good amount of money on it. That has a restriction of solo, u can only get complex and HP dual instruction in it, u can't solo in it. Donno about if u can rent it though for 1500nm xc
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Heck, I'd much rather have a competent pilot fly my plane for a 1,500 cross-country than a CFI doing cycle after cycle in the pattern, running up the CHTs, pulling breakers to fail the glass, having students accidentally yank the prop back at full MP, putting gear up and down and up and down and up and down, and dropping my plane onto the runway as they learning how to land something heavier than a 152.

Although, if you're doing a leaseback in the first place, you're probably not thinking things through very logically anyway. . . .
 
One issue FBO's have is someone rents the plane, flies it out fairly far away, cannot get back because of weather (or mechanical breakdown) and comes back on a bus or airline because they have to get to work. Now what? Something to think about.
 
FLYGUYRY said:
Yeah I suppose I could look elsewhere for rental or a club, problem is (I forgot to mention) I'm using my GI Bill so if I do only rent somewhere else it would be out of my pocket which seems sort of silly. I guess I just need to look around more but I can't recall ever seeing limitations put on renters once you have your ticket.
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Where are you located? Might help us point out alternatives...
 
FLYGUYRY said:
So, my flight school just implemented a bunch of new rules which I think are pretty ridiculous but I wanted to get everyone else's opinion before I start looking elsewhere. I am a private pilot just about finished with my instrument rating. The new rental rules say that as a private pilot I can only travel a maximum distance of 100nm away (wtf) and can only fly a XC if the ceiling is at least 4000 feet and visibility is 8nm (wtf2). As an instrument rated pilot I can fly a whopping (gasp) 150nm with a minimum ceiling of 800 feet.

Now, I am still a young 83 hour TT pilot and there are plenty of flights I would not yet attempt, that being said I feel like being limited to 100nm is really excessive and it's making me think I should look elsewhere. Is this normal? Do any of you guys see these types of limitations? I feel like I am a student pilot again or something :(
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That all sounds reasonable to me.
 
starglider said:
...pulling breakers to fail the glass,
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Cessna put out a Service Bulletin telling people to knock that off quite some time ago. As I recall, FAA followed up with "Don't do that unless the breaker is rated for it."
 
coloradobluesky said:
One issue FBO's have is someone rents the plane, flies it out fairly far away, cannot get back because of weather (or mechanical breakdown) and comes back on a bus or airline because they have to get to work. Now what? Something to think about.
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So, pretty standard 'risk' every FBO on the planet takes, no? That's like saying "we can't serve burgers because what if one is served raw".
 
coloradobluesky said:
One issue FBO's have is someone rents the plane, flies it out fairly far away, cannot get back because of weather (or mechanical breakdown) and comes back on a bus or airline because they have to get to work. Now what? Something to think about.
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Hell, I've done that with my own airplane. Par for the course. I came back in a rental car, but same diff. Welcome to GA.
 
WannFly said:
Some owners are that way. We have a 182 at our school, lots of glass inside, so owner spent good amount of money on it. That has a restriction of solo, u can only get complex and HP dual instruction in it, u can't solo in it. Donno about if u can rent it though for 1500nm xc
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That likely is a restriction put in place by the insurance company. The owner could likely allow solo flight if they wanted to pay a much higher premium, but many aren't interested in that since the amount of time the plane is rented may not cover the increased cost of insurance.

Many flight schools have similar restrictions on their multiengine airplanes for the same reason.
 
61.93 just says you have to have an endorsement for XC flights or for landings at another airport. If you get the endorsement, then according the owner, you still cannot make the flight. Actually according to the owner, you cannot even fulfill the long XC requirement for ppl.

Personally, I'd be looking elsewhere. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, but if you can find a resonable deal elsewhere, take it.
 
There could be a few different reasons the flight school put the restrictions on the planes that they did. The first one that comes to mind is that there is a high demand for flight training so the school wants the planes available for flight instruction, not for an afternoon joyride several hundred miles away that may result in coming back late due to mechanical or weather problems. A renter could have also abused their privileges, ruining it for everyone. Who knows, it could be insurance related too (although likely not).

My suggestion would be to talk to someone at the school that has some decision making ability. You might find that exceptions to the policy can be made with prior approval.
 
mondtster said:
The first one that comes to mind is that there is a high demand for flight training so the school wants the planes available for flight instruction, not for an afternoon joyride several hundred miles away that may result in coming back late due to mechanical or weather problems.
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That makes sense for a "school only" place. I'd leave the place in a heartbeat if they're a full service rental place, though. The entire POINT of getting the rating(s) is to go somewhere in an airplane, after all.

If they're marketing themselves as a full service place with rules like that, they're doing the full service rental industry a disservice -- many market to people specifically saying they should come work hard and spend a lot of money on ratings, so they can enjoy flying planes to places.

Most handle the "aircraft is unavailable" problem with daily minimum hours. Take the airplane away for seven days, you pay for a minimum number of hours to do that, based loosely on what the training side will lose while it's gone. When they need more aircraft to cover such things they already have the solid rental numbers to entice more leasebacks or they buy more airplanes.

Out west here, 100nm is nothing. That's another consideration here. It's 95nm just to get from my home airport to Cheyenne, WY and barely get past the State line. Direct. And you can't go direct usually with the DEN Bravo in the way.

So it really depends on how they market themselves. If they're just a school, fine. But if they're pretending to be a full service FBO with rentals, good riddance. Don't need dumb stuff like that in the biz. Unless of course they're also an aircraft broker and trying to annoy folks into buying airplanes. Haha.
 
denverpilot said:
That makes sense for a "school only" place. I'd leave the place in a heartbeat if they're a full service rental place, though. The entire POINT of getting the rating(s) is to go somewhere in an airplane, after all.

If they're marketing themselves as a full service place with rules like that, they're doing the full service rental industry a disservice -- many market to people specifically saying they should come work hard and spend a lot of money on ratings, so they can enjoy flying planes to places.
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Well, I'd say they're only slightly below average. You're right that most schools _market_ the ability to go fly places, but in reality few provide a reasonable way to use rentals effectively post-rating. Schools lose a lot of students post-solo, and a big part of that is probably that they've achieved enough to feel like a true pilot by then but also learned enough to see that they'll never actually be able to use an airplane to go somewhere unless they cough up the cash to buy their own bird.
 
FLYGUYRY said:
So, I guess in a way there was? There have been two incidents lately, one of which involved a student pilot somehow taxiing into not one, not two, but three civil air patrol aircraft destroying one of my schools planes and 2 CAP planes (the third seriously damaged) in the process. Don't ask, I have no idea how that is possible and the new rules wouldn't have stopped that from happening.

The other, which really wasn't an incident but just an inconvenience, was another private pilot who is in my instrument class now (good guy, knows his stuff) went up to NYC to get some food, took off and had a CO2 warning go off in the plane so he turned around to land and get it checked out, by the time it was able to get looked at weather rolled in and the AC had to remain in Teterboro overnight. The owner was pretty ****ed about that and I'm not exactly sure why as he certainly made the right call in turning back AND remaining there instead of trying to take off in marginal conditions at night.
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Sounds like you're in MD. Come to KDMW. We are encouraged to rent long distance. Last year I did 2 1200+ mile multiday trips
 
Find a club or buy a C140 or something.
 
I learned quickly after flight school that my flight school and others near me did not like people taking the plane long. As others have said- they want the training revenue. I learned to fly so I can travel all over the country in shorter time. My flight school basically laughed at me when I told them I wanted to go to NC from Florida for a few days. Then I went down to Florida Flyers in St. Augustine and they wanted to charge so much money that it wasn't worth it - I had to buy a plane. Of course that's the best way but not everyone can do that so I echo what most here have said: find a club, partner, or better place to rent. I don't know anything about the GI Bill as I've never served but if you can use it at one place, can't you use it at others?
 
Another thing I've noticed with flight schools is that very often the owners are not very accomplished pilots, and so they're completely out of their depth trying to come up with reasonable policies. Opening a flight school seems to be a common move for A&Ps, probably thinking that they can save a ton of money by doing their own maintenance. The problem is that they really have no understanding of flying beyond just going around the patch, and so they're incapable of building policies that make sense.

I got my instrument rating at a school like this, and I ended up trying to rent one of the airplanes to make a 500nm trip--well within the nonstop range of the SR22s they were renting. The weather was perfect; I could've done the whole trip VFR. The owner was practically apoplectic about it. Some of that was business economics but also part of it was that he would personally never have made that kind of trip, and it genuinely scared him. He probably had more hours than I did at the time, but it was all just ferrying his little planes around, doing test flights, and staying within 100nm. Didn't even have an instrument rating.

I was looking into schools up here for my brother-in-law who's looking to learn, and I looked up the owner in the airmen database: PP-ASEL. Someone who has never flown to go places and lacks even an instrument rating simply cannot have the experience to run a flight operation well.
 
On long vfr trips I would get all the sectionals out and tape them together in groups based on heading. Then I would cut them so the entire trip was on 1' wide map sections and roll them up. I would end up with little map scrolls that had my whole trip right down the center of the roll. Easy to use and keep organized. It was a lot of work in prep but when you're actually flying across the country vfr it was handy.
 
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