HAPPY NEW YEAR everybody. As we get back to flying this week (slowly, due to winter weather, as you might expect) I’m introducing some new ideas into my flight training.

Specifically, I’m offering three new training guarantees for all my students this year. I don’t believe anything like this is offered by any other flights school in Canada and I’m quite excited to tell you about them. I hold myself and my students to high standards of teaching and flying and these are ways of demonstrating my commitment to that.

1. Solo within twenty hours

I think a really good metric for a flight school’s competence and student-centric culture is how long it takes the school to train a student to a safe standard for solo flight. My target for a new pilot is fifteen hours of flight training. That’s approximately how many hours you should have in your logbook by the time you’re sent off for that first circuit, alone.

I guarantee students at my school that they can reach a safe “first solo” standard within 20 hours of teaching. If they don’t I will give them my teaching time, free of charge, until they meet that standard.

This guarantee applies to everyone who:

• has undertaken all their flying training with me, from their introductory lesson onwards. One or two “fam flights“, “experience flights” and the like from other flight schools don’t count, but if you done a whole bunch of training somewhere else, I can’t vouch for what you’ve been taught or how long it will take to undo the damage if it was wrong.
• books and attends at least one lesson every week, continuously. If you skip one or more lessons for holiday, business, family, or other reasons that’s on you – I won’t vouch for your training time. (On the other hand lessons that are postponed because of weather or maintenance don’t count as an absence from training.)
• watches the video of each lesson and writes up detailed notes within 48 hours. Studying what you did in the last lesson and writing down your thoughts are an important part of your training; they are what I expect from everyone. If you’re not prepared to engage in that, then all bets are off.

If you meet these conditions then reach twenty hours flight time, and you’re still not yet at a safe solo flight standard then I will teach you extra lessons as needed (we may need to fix additional or different lesson times) to get you to that standard. You still have to pay for the airplane, which covers the cost of fuel and maintenance, but there will be no teaching fee.

2. The teaching is right, or I’ll make it right

This guarantee applies to students training with instructors under my supervision. As you’d hope, I keep a careful watch on what my instructors teach you, as well as how they teach it. (I also get to watch the videos of your flights!) If something is taught to you in a way that doesn’t meet my own standards, or is unhelpful, or impedes your progress, I’m right on it. If necessary, I will fly with you for free (no lesson fee) to fix the problem.

I don’t expect to have to to do this very often, because my instructors are hand-picked and trained by me, and as I said, I’m watching, but you now can have extra confidence flying with my instructors.

3. If you don’t like the lesson, the teaching is free

This guarantee applies to all flying lessons from me and from instructors I supervise.

If you didn’t enjoy a lesson or you didn’t learn anything from it, you don’t have to pay for the instruction you received. It doesn’t apply to introductory lessons (they’re a fixed price) and yes, you still have to pay for the airplane. But if you really didn’t get good value from being taught then – the teaching was free!

Let me wish you once again a successful 2021, in which you achieve all your flight training goals, and may we have weather similar to the photograph at the top in which to achieve them.