Newcastle or Teesside?

[BigSteve81]

Training

waveydavey,

I've flown with both NFS and St George Flight Training.

I was about 20hrs into my PPL when the Aero Club went under and went to St Georges due to it being the cheapest at Teesside.

I have to agree with Topjet on training at Newcastle, JC is a great instructor and having flown with nearly every instructor NFS and the Aero Club have employed over the last year, I have yet to come across what I would consider (with my limited experience) a poor one.
I wouldn't let the £25 landing fee put you off as they arrange the training times to miss the peak landing times to avoid the higher costs. I believe you can now go to Carlisle to do circuits to avoid the Newcastle T'n'G fees which will bring the cost down a little.

St George runs a fleet of PA 38s which are a little different to fly than the PA 28s at Newcastle. At Teesside when in the circuit you generally have the airfield to yourself, (in 3 hours of circuits I only ever had to contend with a Cessna and an Airbus) at Newcastle you can see five times that in an hour which can cause a lot of frustration due to orbiting when doing circuits. Also at Teesside you get unlimited free circuits!
I only ever flew with one instructor (Peter Gray) at Teesside and he was a nice chap, knew his stuff and always took time to explain things in depth.

What eventually got me back up to Newcastle was the travel time/cost and traffic.
The problems I faced were petrol costs, around £10 - £15 a trip. (add that to the price of the lessons and your getting close to the price of the lessons at Newcastle)
It generally took me an hour and ten mins to get there, and the same back. If there is a bad accident on the A1 add an hour to that (which can result in you missing your lesson if the accident happens when your going there) so a 1 hour lesson can potentially take over 4 hours of your time (happened to me once).
You've also got the problem if the weather is hit and miss and they tell you to come down just in case, you make the trip down there, after an hours driving, the weather turns bad and you made the trip for nothing (again happened to me once).
The last straw for me was when my car broke down one Friday and I had to cancel two lessons (Sat and Sun) as I had no way of getting down to Teesside, a quick call to JC at Newcastle got me in for the Sunday and I could get the Metro to the airport while my car was in the garage.
As you can see my decision to return to Newcastle when NFS started up was mainly due to the extra travelling problems that came with training at Teesside but living in Newcastle.


If your willing to put up with the travelling go for it at St Georges in Teesside, if not come to NFS at Newcastle, and like Topjet said we've got the all important bar at Newcastle.

If you havent already done so give them both a call and arrange to pop in and have a chat with an instructor and a look around at the facilities/aircraft etc and see what you think for yourself.

Hope this helps,

Big Steve