It definitely is a very rural and basic flight school, but it's also worth the price in my opinion.
I previously flew and studied in a good flight school in Western Europe, so keep in mind I was used to high standards.
I'll list some pros and cons of my experience with BestFly.
Pros:
- Instructors have a lot of available time to fly, therefore you'll be able to finish the training in a relatively short time.
- Most of them are kind and helpful, and they provide a decent quality of training.
- They have quite a large fleet, consisting of 2 PA44-180T Seminole, 3 C172s and several others C152s.
- After taking an exam, the CAA where I got my license requires a lot of extra documents, not required by the Hungarian one. They were able to provide all of them quickly.
- They offer long term accommodations few kilometers away from the airport, exactly in the city center. Good prices, the apartments are nice, comfortable and well furnished.
- Most of the time the instructors will give you a lift from the accommodation to the airport.
They also provide few bicycles on request.
- Overall prices.
Not closely related to the flight school itself, but few other things I liked where:
- The Hungarian CAA, really efficient and great availability of examiners.
- There are several grass airstrips around Kalocsa. It was fun and challenging to operate there in windy conditions.
And now the negative points:
- Even if the general conditions of the planes were alright, they were pretty dirty, dusty, and with old avionics. For example, all the C152s (except one) only had a Mode-A transponder. Therefore you weren't allowed to fly in controlled airspace.
Also, don't expect a G1000 on the C172s. Two of them were only equipped with the G650, the third one with a G750Xi.
- There are no real SOPs. Just non written rules that differ even among the instructors.
- It's not airline-oriented.
- They will not allow you to fly outside of the national borders.
- Unfortunately, few instructors aren't that great and lack in knowledge (especially about GPS navigation and new technologies).
- After a while I got tired of flying there. I flew my first 100 hours in a pretty complex airspace, with a lot of traffic around and most of the time flying through large international airports, across the sea or around 10000ft high mountains. While Hungary might be an amazing country, sometimes I found it a bit boring flying there. Just an endless plain with few medium airports and a lot of small airstrips.
I tried to compare the experiences, newly acquired skills and knowledge with other close friends who studied in another well known flight school in Warsaw.
Came out that their training wasn't much better than mine.
Therefore I'm quite happy about my experience with BestFly. It's definitely not the best flight school around, but they always gave me what I asked and paid for. A lot could be easily improved and corrected, but again, can't complain for that price.
Hope someone will find this feedback useful!
