Alright Derby Matt,
I am currently about 30ish hours into my JAA PPL at Phoenix flying school at Netherthorpe and I can thoroughly recommend it. I have done all my flying with the chief flying instructor who I find to be an excellent tutor. Very friendly and approachable.
I too was torn between a number of schools and was unsure about flying from a grass runway rather than a tarmac one. I figured that I may be less confident when visiting large airports after spending all my time flying from a small grass field, however my fears it would seem are completely unfounded.
Phoenix is the smaller of the two on the airfield but in my opinion the more friendly. There has been a rolling program of upgrading all the clubs aircraft to newly refitted and resprayed C-150 Aerobats which are maintained on site by the clubs own aircraft maintanence firm. This helps them keep the costs down to be one of, if not the cheapest flying club in the country, £92 per hour for instruction and only £72 per hour for PPL hire, this makes a sizeable difference in price from other clubs over the course of 45 hours. Oh, another bonus is that the club has no joining/membership fees which has the potential to save you an extra few quid.
I actually started my flying at a local gliding club and can asure you that Netherthorpe airfield offers possibly the most challenging flying I've done yet. The general consensus on the airfield is that if you can fly in and out of netherthorpe (especially runway 36/18, the shortest registered runway in the country
) then you can fly in and out of anywhere, which is good for the confidence when you finally are able to go and visit other airfields on your own.
With regards weather, I've had no real problems that have resulted from the fact that the airfield is grass, its very well maintained, unless of course you can order high cloud over tarmac runways
.
A/C availability is always excellent and this would appear to be the case for PPL hire. Another bonus is that the club will allow extended hire of an A/C without any hassle and as i understand it you only pay for hours flown.
I'm selling it to myself all over again
Have a look at this link to see what other people say about Netherthorpe
www.ukga.com/aerodrome/reviews.cfm?aerodromeId=1328
Good luck with the flying, get ready to be skint
