Multi-engine rating
Two engines, one of which gets shut down on purpose while you keep flying. It is the shortest rating on a career route and the one that permanently changes how you read a performance chart.
What is a multi-engine rating?
It is an airplane multiengine land class rating, added to whatever pilot certificate you hold now, and 14 CFR 61.63(c) is the paragraph that governs it. Two things are demanded and one thing is conspicuously absent: your instructor has to endorse you as competent and proficient, you have to pass a practical test, and no minimum number of training hours applies at all.
That third point deserves a second reading, because it is the most misread sentence in twin training. 61.63(c)(3) excuses an applicant for an added class rating from the training-time floors that would otherwise attach to that certificate level. There is no federal ten hours, no fifteen, no twenty. An examiner measures competence and the hours are whatever it took you to get there. Ten to fifteen in the airplane is the ordinary range, and current instrument pilots who fly weekly tend to sit at the bottom of it.
61.63(c)(4) removes the other usual obstacle. Where an airplane rating already sits on your certificate at that level, no further knowledge test applies. Nothing to book at a testing centre, no question bank, no waiting on a score report before an examiner will see you. That absence is the single biggest reason a competent pilot can finish this rating inside a fortnight.
None of which tells you why the flying is difficult. It is difficult because a light twin with one propeller stopped is not a single-engine airplane carrying a spare. It is a wounded airplane that still flies, and most of what you learned about how airplanes climb quietly stops applying. That is what the rest of this page is about.
Why does one dead engine cost so much more than half the performance?
Because you do not climb on your power. You climb on the power you are not already spending. The FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook, at chapter 13, attaches a figure to it: halve the installed power and climb performance falls away by 80 to 90 percent.
What vanishes is the surplus, not the total
Holding altitude in a light twin already spends most of what the engines produce. Whatever remains above that — the surplus — is the entire budget for going up. Take away one engine and you have not halved the climb rate. You have removed half of the total, and the half you removed came almost entirely out of a surplus that was thin to begin with.
That is the arithmetic underneath the 80 to 90 percent. It is also why an airplane climbing briskly on two can be reduced to a couple of hundred feet a minute on one, and why on a hot September afternoon at a field 802 feet above sea level, where density altitude behaves like roughly 4,100, it can be reduced to nothing worth having.
- Level flight is paid for first, out of everything available
- Climb is paid for second, out of the remainder
- Losing an engine takes half the total and nearly all of the remainder
- Density altitude then bills the same remainder a second time
Then the airplane grows a speed brake where the engine used to be
A propeller whose engine has quit does not obligingly stop. Airflow keeps driving it round, and a propeller turning at a shallow blade angle is a superb brake. The handbook's comparison is the one worth memorising: a fast-windmilling propeller can generate parasite drag rivalling that of the whole airframe.
So a failure hands you two bills in the same second. Most of the climb is gone, and you have effectively bolted a second airplane's worth of drag onto the one you are flying. Feathering settles the second bill: blades turned edge-on to the airflow stop rotating, and their contribution to parasite drag drops to about the least it can be.
Which is precisely why the drills spend so long on identification before anything gets touched. Feather the wrong side and you have just shut down the engine that was still working for you.
And the whole time it is trying to turn
Thrust from the live engine acts along a line set several feet outboard of the fuselage. Force multiplied by that distance is a yawing moment, hauling the nose toward the dead side, continuously, for exactly as long as the good engine makes power. The rudder is what stands against it.
Now the part that decides how the day ends. That yawing moment tracks the power the working engine is producing, and that does not fall away as you slow down. Rudder authority tracks how fast air is moving across the rudder, and that falls away steeply. Two curves running in opposite directions. They cross.
The airspeed at which they cross carries a legal definition, and it is the reason a twin checkride looks the way it does.
Is V_MC a technique you learn or a number somebody measured?
A number somebody measured. The definition in 14 CFR 1.2 is compact — minimum control speed, critical engine out — and the current airworthiness rule at 23.2135(c) sharpens it into a calibrated airspeed at which control can still be held after thrust is suddenly lost on that engine. A manufacturer demonstrated it. You do not develop it.
It was measured with everything stacked against the airplane
FAA-H-8083-3C sets out the configuration used to pin the number down, and every item on the list is chosen to make the answer as unflattering as it can honestly be: takeoff power on each engine to start with, propeller controls where a takeoff would have them, the least helpful weight and centre of gravity, gear up, takeoff flap, trim set for takeoff, airborne with ground effect no longer helping, and bank held to five degrees at most.
That is what a certification speed is for: a floor pinned down under the least generous circumstances anyone would reasonably meet, so a pilot in kinder circumstances has margin in hand rather than a surprise waiting.
- Takeoff power initially on each engine
- Propeller controls in the recommended takeoff position
- Least favourable weight and centre of gravity
- Gear up, takeoff flap, trimmed for takeoff
- Airborne, out of ground effect, five degrees of bank at most
One line in that list runs against instinct
Gear up. The handbook is explicit that retracting the landing gear pushes V_MC higher. Legs hanging below the fuselage add keel area aft of the centre of gravity, the airplane weathervanes back toward the relative wind a little more willingly, and the rudder gets help it did not ask for. Raise the gear and that help leaves.
So the published figure assumes the unhelpful case on that axis too. A real airplane, at a real weight, gear still down, will often stay controllable below the book number — and will reach the stall before it loses directional control, which is a different failure and a far better one to have.
A citation to be careful with
The Airplane Flying Handbook credits that condition list to 14 CFR part 23 section 23.149. That section is gone. Part 23 was rebuilt as a performance-based rule and the old numbered requirements went with it, including 23.1545, which used to prescribe the markings on an airspeed indicator. Controllability lives at 23.2135 now; instrument markings live at 23.2610.
We raise it because a page citing a repealed section with confidence is a page nobody checked. The test conditions are still what manufacturers work to. The section number beneath them is not.
Blue line, and three speeds the regulations never define
V_YSE gives the best rate of climb on one engine and is the blue radial line painted on most airspeed indicators. V_XSE gives the steepest climb angle available on one engine. V_SSE marks the safe speed for deliberately shutting one down, meaning the slowest speed at which an instructor ought to be failing an engine on you on purpose.
Not one of the three appears in 14 CFR 1.2. We read the section rather than assuming. They are flight manual speeds and instrument markings, described for pilots in the handbook rather than fixed in the regulations, and knowing which of your V-speeds is law and which is airmanship is exactly the kind of thing an examiner enjoys asking about.
No V-speed figure for any of our airplanes appears anywhere on this site. The speed you will fly is in the flight manual for that airframe, that day, at that weight, and a number typed onto a web page is not that.
How does the rating actually run, day by day?
Five stages, normally inside two weeks of consecutive days. Nothing has to be booked at a testing centre first, which removes the biggest single source of delay in every other rating.
Systems, on the ground
Fuel, electrics, hydraulics, propeller governors, the feathering mechanism and the accumulator that lets you bring a feathered propeller back. A twin carries two of most things plus a set of crossfeeds and interconnections a single has never needed. The oral portion of the checkride lives almost entirely here.
Ordinary flying, with both engines running
Taxi, takeoff, climb, cruise, circuit, landing. This takes less time than people brace themselves for. A Seminole flies like an airplane, and handling is not where the difficulty is hiding.
Failures at altitude, over and over
Identify, verify, feather, secure — then again with the instructor picking the moment rather than announcing it. This is where the hours actually go, and where you find out why the checklist is ordered the way it is instead of some other way.
The V_MC demonstration and single-engine approaches
Flown high. The handbook has you pick an altitude leaving at least 3,000 feet of air beneath the manoeuvre, and the Airman Certification Standards want a prompt, coordinated recovery rather than a heroic one. Then approaches flown on a single engine, and a go-around you are not really going to be given.
Rehearsal, then the practical test
One full dress rehearsal flown with an instructor who has not been teaching you, which catches the habits your own instructor has stopped noticing. Then the designated pilot examiner. 61.63(c)(1) wants the endorsement in your logbook before you go; 61.63(c)(2) is the test itself.
What does a multi-engine rating cost here?
$5,100, fixed the day you enrol, flown in a Piper Seminole this school owns and maintains. Below is what sits inside that figure and what sits outside it, because a price with no inventory attached is not really a price.
Multi-Engine Add-On
Added to a private or a commercial certificate. Sold as a rating, not as a stack of hours.
- ✓Seminole time flown to checkride standard
- ✓An instructor beside you on all of it
- ✓Every engine-out, feathering and V_MC exercise
- ✓The 61.63(c)(1) endorsement
- ✓The figure holds if you need more hours than average
Airline Career Track
When the twin is phase four of five rather than the destination, the whole route carries one price.
- ✓Private, instrument, commercial, multi, instructor
- ✓Financing from $2,500 down
- ✓Nothing is repriced at a phase boundary
Assessment flight in the twin
Sixty minutes of dual instruction in the Seminole. You fly it, and the time goes in your logbook.
- ✓An hour of dual in the multi-engine trainer
- ✓Credited whole against a program you enrol in inside a day
- ✓The fastest way to test the idea before committing to it
Redbird MCX session
Full-motion, fully enclosed, indifferent to weather. Good for rehearsing a failure without spending a Seminole hour to do it.
- ✓Never scrubbed for cloud or wind
- ✓Strong on flows, checklists and identification drills
- ✓Weak on landings, and we say so
What can a stranger verify about twin training here?
A short rating depends on an airplane that is genuinely available, instructors legally permitted to teach in it, and a number that stays where it was written. Each of those is checkable rather than assertable.
A Piper Seminole held in-house, not chartered in
The twin belongs to the operation. It is not hired from a third party on the morning of your lesson, which is the arrangement that turns a one-hour booking into a two-week wait. It sits on the inspection regime that applies once an aircraft is used to give instruction for hire.
Inspected under 14 CFR 91.409(b)Make-and-model hours every multi instructor must already hold
14 CFR 61.195(f) bars anyone from teaching toward a rating in a twin until they have flown five hours as pilot in command of that exact make and model. Small number. Real gate. Reasonable to ask about before you book.
14 CFR 61.195(f)Instructors, so a two-week syllabus does not stall on one diary
Commercial certificate or ATP, a flight instructor certificate on top, a current medical, and legal responsibility as pilot in command on every flight. A compressed rating collapses the moment the only qualified person is away.
14 CFR 61.183 · 61.23Training days a year, counted rather than asserted
Derived from NOAA ASOS observations recorded at this field across the twelve months ending 1 August 2026. A day counted only where the ceiling held at 3,000 feet or better with five statute miles of visibility, for four qualifying daylight hours. Tempo is what makes a short rating short.
NOAA ASOS via the Iowa Environmental MesonetPrices sitting behind a contact form
None of them. $5,100 is on this page, itemised, with no spread attached and nothing to request.
Published in fullHow do you put two multi-engine quotes side by side?
Make them answer the same five lines. Most twin quotes are not actually comparable, not because anyone is being dishonest, but because they describe different objects — one is a total, another is a rate, a third is a rate with an assumed hour count attached. No school is named on this site and no rival's figure is printed here. What follows is a form you can take to any of them, ours included.
Line one — the shape of the number. A total you will owe, or a rate to be multiplied later? Write down which. A rate with an assumed hour count beside it is a forecast wearing a price tag, and those forecasts err generous.
Line two — the right seat. Nobody earns this rating without an instructor on essentially every hour. A quote that prices the airframe and mentions instruction separately reads cheaper on the page and settles dearer at the end.
Line three — the overrun. Ask what changes if you need five hours beyond the syllabus. Get the answer in writing. Ours changes nothing, because $5,100 is set at enrolment and an unusually slow week is our problem rather than yours.
Line four — the ground. Does the figure carry the systems instruction the oral will test, or only flight time? Systems teaching is where a twin oral is won, and it is the easiest thing to leave out of a quotation.
Line five — the exclusions. Every honest quote excludes something; the useful question is whether the exclusions were volunteered or discovered. Ours are three, they are named above the price, and none is billed through us.
Fill those five lines in for everyone you are considering and lay the sheets side by side. Where a figure lands above $5,100 for the same class rating in the same class of airplane, the gap is buying something specific, and asking what before paying is ordinary diligence. The answer might be a good one. You will never hear it unless the question takes that shape.
What this rating does, and what we will not claim about it
The rating adds airplane multiengine land to the certificate you already carry. It does not raise the level of that certificate: a private pilot who adds a twin rating remains a private pilot with the same privileges and the same limits. Currency is counted separately again, since 14 CFR 61.57(a) tallies takeoffs and landings by category, class and type.
Training here happens at Van Nuys Airport under part 61. This is not an airline, it is not owned by one, and no cadet program, pathway agreement or hiring relationship with any carrier exists. Nothing above offers you an interview, a job or a salary, and no carrier is named anywhere on this site.
No pass rate and no graduate count are published here. The operation is new, any such figure would be drawn from a sample too small to carry meaning, and manufacturing one would be worse than the silence. What gets published instead is the syllabus, the price, the hours other people typically need, and the regulation sitting behind every requirement on this page.
What people ask before booking a twin rating
None, as a matter of regulation. An applicant adding a class rating is excused by 14 CFR 61.63(c)(3) from the training-time floors that would otherwise attach at that certificate level. Ten to fifteen hours in the airplane is the ordinary range in practice, and pilots who are instrument-current and flying weekly tend to land at the lower end of it.
$5,100, set at enrolment, flown in a Piper Seminole. It covers the flight time, the instructor on all of it, the ground and systems teaching, every engine-out and V_MC exercise, and the endorsement 61.63(c)(1) requires. Examiner, medical and personal equipment sit outside it and are paid by you directly.
Not where an airplane rating already sits on your certificate at that level, because 61.63(c)(4) lifts the extra knowledge test in that situation. There is still an oral at the practical test, which is a different animal and goes deep into fuel, electrical and propeller systems.
It marks V_YSE, the best rate of climb available with one engine inoperative. Worth knowing where the definition lives, though: V_YSE is not one of the abbreviations listed in 14 CFR 1.2. It belongs to the flight manual and to the instrument face, set out for pilots in the Airplane Flying Handbook and nowhere in the regulations themselves.
Because climbing is funded out of surplus power, and the surplus was never large. The FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook puts the loss at 80 to 90 percent of climb performance when half the power goes. A windmilling propeller then adds parasite drag the handbook compares to that of the entire airframe, which is why feathering is the first thing the drill protects.
It turns the blades edge-on so the propeller stops turning and stops working as a brake, dropping its parasite drag to about its minimum. The hard part is not the mechanism, it is the identification: feathering the side that was still producing thrust turns a manageable emergency into a different kind of afternoon.
Yes. 61.63(c) applies at whatever certificate level you already hold, so a private pilot adds airplane multiengine land and a commercial pilot does the same. The training looks the same either way; the practical test is flown against the standards for the certificate you hold.
Ten to fourteen days at this field flying consecutive days, since nothing needs booking at a test centre and the syllabus is short. Spread across weekends it stretches into two or three months and tends to cost more effort, because engine-out handling decays quickly between sessions.
61.63(c) does not require one. But instrument tasks form part of the practical test, and skipping them can leave an Airplane Multiengine VFR Only limitation printed on your certificate, which you would later pay to remove. 14 CFR 61.45(b)(2) is the mechanism: fly a test in an aircraft that cannot cover every task and the rating is issued with a limitation attached.
On a twin whose propellers turn the same way, it is the one whose failure hurts most. FAA-H-8083-3C explains it with P-factor: the descending blade on the right engine works further out from the centre of gravity, giving it the longer moment arm, so losing the left engine produces the most asymmetry. Twins built with counter-rotating propellers remove that asymmetry, and have no critical engine at all.
The multi-engine cluster
An hour in the Seminole settles what a brochure cannot
Book an hour of dual instruction in the twin. You will fly it, the time is loggable, and within ten minutes you will know whether the second engine reads as an asset or as workload. Enrol inside a day and the fee comes off the program.
Fly the aeroplane once, then decide
The assessment flight is the first hour of the syllabus and a two-way evaluation. You fly it from the left seat with an instructor beside you, they write down what they saw, and you get an honest read on whether the plan is realistic. It is loggable, and it is credited in full against enrolment if you enroll within 24 hours.
What happens on an assessment flight →