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Old 7th Jan 2014, 18:39
  #21 (permalink)  
matthewlai
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Santa Clara, California
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sorry, i have to tell you i have contacted Sea land air.
the guys, Dominic and Jin, both stubborn.
i only ask for the final total price for the whole professional pilot program with ppl, cpl, multi engine, multi ifr, etc....
they said they can't give me the exact price.
i did make a few emails to them to explain, but they insist they can't give exact price.
i know final price is depend on how long i can get the license, but at least they give me the minimal cost.
That's because they are being honest. You'll find that most honest schools will NOT give you a price, because it varies so much. They can pull a number out of thin air ("minimum hours"), but that doesn't mean anything.

For example, the Transport Canada minimum for PPL is 45 hours, but unless you already have a lot of prior flying experience (eg. gliders), it's impossible to get the license in anywhere near that. 50-60 hours seems to be average, and many people go to 70-80 hours.

The minimum prices are actually all online (click the links under "Pilot Training") but that just gives you a meaningless and totally unrealistic number.

I know you want an exact price for budgeting, etc, everyone does. But the truth is there is just no way of predicting that. Flying is not like most things. For most things, like university, you go for 4 years, pay all the tuition fees, and get a degree in the end if you don't fail courses. Everyone pays more or less the same.

For flying, they won't give you licenses until you are at a very well defined skill level, and different people take very different amounts of time and money to get to that level, for many reasons. By far the biggest reason is instructor quality. If you have a good instructor that can bring you up to flight test standards in 50 hours, that will be much cheaper than a bad instructor that takes 80 hours. But obviously they can't guarantee those numbers either. So if you want to save money, talk to the instructors, and find one that you feel will teach well. Instructors are all very different with very different teaching styles.

I haven't talked to Jin much, but Dominic is a trustworthy and honest person (a pilot from the UK). He is very open with communication (we talk about aircraft maintenance issues all the time, which many places don't talk about with customers), but he won't give you information that he isn't sure of, and definitely won't make things up. Unfortunately for flying, giving you an "estimated price" would be making something up.
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