Value for money? ? ?

[Thick Blue Line]

My local flying schools charge around £120 for an hours instruction.

An integrated course in the UK seems to be in the region of about £70k.

What is the margin on these figures (and any others)? Is this representantive of the actual cost of the lesson/course?

Infomed answers/opinions please!

[TheBeak]

Integrated schools that train abroad (outside Europe) per unit trainee make a healthy profit. USA and NZ in particular.

£120 an hour is not too bad depending on the aircraft.

- About £20 an hour will be for the instructor.
- On a PA28 at a fuel burn of around 35ish ltrs an hour at about £1.50 a litre for 100LL gives a cost of £52.50
- Insurance on top and the cost of having the aircraft and a landing fee unless that is not included means there is not much margin.

Consider a Seneca, you can hire one of those for £280 -290 an hour.At Oxford it costs £485 an hour. How much extra are they paying the instructors? Even for the IR apps and airways don't cost that much. They take the piss when you really can't afford it.

[Groundloop]

Integrated schools that train abroad (outside Europe) per unit trainee make a healthy profit.

I doubt that any integrated schools make a "healthy" profit!

[TheBeak]

Really?

On my first search in the USA I found a C172 for $120 which is around £70 an in NZ I found a C172 for $160 that's about £60 and those are standard hour per hour rates not block rates. The costs of instructors and staff are alot less, airport charges are non existant if anything and rates are alot less. Yet modualr FTOs solely based in the UK still manage to come in at much less for their course costs. I possibly am missing something, what is it?

[Thick Blue Line]

Less than £60-£70 an hour in the UK? Where is that?

[TheBeak]

Who said there was an aircraft for less than £60-70 an hour in the UK?

[Thick Blue Line]

apologies if im being thick, I thought you were saying that training costs in the UK for modular courses were less then those you quoted for NZ and US?

[TheBeak]

No what I was saying is that they are examples of costs in those countries. Integrated FTOs that use those countries as a training base must be operating at those prices as a maximum. Yet they are charging UK prices for the courses - they aren't passing on the saving and that is shown by the fact that modular courses flown entirely in the UK are cheaper than the Integrated FTOs that use these countries cheaper labour and operating costs.