Multi-Engine Rating
The shortest rating on a career route, and the one that permanently changes how you read a performance chart. Two engines, and a syllabus built around switching one of them off.
What Is A Multi-Engine Rating, In Regulatory Terms?
Airplane multiengine land, written onto the pilot certificate you already carry. 14 CFR 61.63(c) is the paragraph that governs it, and reading it turns up two demands and one conspicuous absence. Your instructor has to endorse your logbook or training record, attesting to competence in the knowledge areas and proficiency in the areas of operation. You have to pass a practical test. Then the absence, at 61.63(c)(3). Part 61's training-time floors, the ones that would normally attach at that certificate level, simply do not reach an applicant adding a class rating.
That third clause is where people misread the rating. No federal ten hours, no fifteen, no twenty. The examiner measures whether you can fly the airplane, and the hours are however many getting there took. Ten to fifteen in the aircraft is the ordinary spread; a current instrument pilot flying consecutive days sits near the bottom of it.
61.63(c)(4) removes the other usual obstacle by waiving the extra knowledge test for anyone who already carries an airplane rating at the same certificate level. So there is nothing to schedule at a testing centre and no score report to wait on. That single absence is why a competent pilot can finish a twin rating inside a fortnight, while every other rating on the route waits on a written.
Why Does A Light Twin Lose Far More Than Half Its Performance?
Because you do not climb on the power you have. You climb on the power you are not already spending, and in a light twin that margin was never generous. NTSB Safety Alert SA-081 states the arithmetic without softening it: shutting down one of two engines is a fifty percent power loss that can cut climb performance by at least eighty to ninety percent, on top of the asymmetry it creates.
Holding altitude consumes most of what two engines make. What sits above that line is the whole budget for going up. Remove one engine and the rate of climb does not halve; you have taken away half the total, and the half you took came almost entirely out of a margin that was thin already. A twin doing a thousand feet a minute on two can be reduced to a couple of hundred on one — and on a September afternoon at a field 802 feet above sea level, where the air behaves as though it sat at roughly 4,100, reduced to nothing you would bet a departure on.
This is the fact that reframes the rest of the page. The second engine is not a spare. It is what gets you to a runway, not what lets you carry on as before, and every drill in the syllabus is built on that distinction. A school selling a twin rating as a performance upgrade has skipped the part that matters.
It is also the rating's honest downside. A pilot who earns it and then flies twins rarely, heavy, or badly is measurably worse off than one who stayed in singles, because asymmetric handling decays fast and the airplane punishes hesitation. If you are not going to keep it current, what you have bought is a line on a certificate rather than a capability.
What Does A Windmilling Propeller Do To The Airplane?
A propeller whose engine has stopped does not politely stop with it. Airflow keeps driving the blades round, and blades spinning fast at a shallow angle make an excellent brake. The FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook gives the comparison worth memorising in its multiengine chapter: at high windmilling speed and low blade angle, one propeller can throw up parasite drag on the order of the whole airframe's.
So the failure presents two bills in the same second. Most of the climb has gone, and you have effectively bolted a second airplane's worth of drag onto the one still flying. Feathering settles the second bill — blades turned edge-on to the airflow, rotation stops, and that drag falls to about the least the installation can offer.
There is a deadline on it that most pages skip. NTSB Safety Alert SA-091 warns that once propeller rpm decays past the point where the start locks engage, feathering is no longer available to the pilot at all, and its instruction is to feather before rpm reaches it. Partial power loss is where this bites: the engine is still turning, the decision feels less urgent, and the window shuts anyway.
What Is The Order Of Actions After An Engine Fails?
Five movements, in this order, and the order is the skill. Each is trained until it happens without deliberation, because the airplane is spending your options while you think about them.
Fly The Airplane First
Pitch for blue line, feed in rudder against the yaw, and bank a few degrees toward the working engine. Nothing else is worth doing until the airplane is going where you point it. The accidents behind the NTSB's alerts are overwhelmingly cases where somebody skipped this to work the problem instead.
Identify
Dead foot, dead engine. The leg doing no work names the side that has quit, because the rudder pedal you are not pressing belongs to the side that no longer needs it. One second, and it prevents the worst error available to you.
Verify
Close the throttle you believe belongs to the failed side and watch. No change and you were right. A change and you were wrong, discovered cheaply, at altitude, with that engine still there to advance again.
Feather, Then Secure
Propeller control to feather while there is still rpm to feather with. Then fuel, ignition, alternator and cowl flap for that side. Securing is a checklist; feathering is a clock, and they are not the same kind of task.
Only Then, Decide Where To Go
Single-engine ceiling, terrain, fuel and the nearest long runway are the inputs. On a hot day at a hot field the answer is frequently not the airport you departed from, and the airplane will not wait while you argue with that.
Is V_MC A Technique You Develop Or A Number Somebody Measured?
A number somebody measured, under conditions chosen to be as unflattering as they honestly can be. 14 CFR 1.2 defines the abbreviation as a minimum control speed flown with the critical engine shut down. The airworthiness rule that produces the figure, 14 CFR 23.2135(c), frames it as a calibrated airspeed: the slowest at which control survives an abrupt critical thrust loss, and the manufacturer has to establish it for the worst takeoff and landing configurations.
Two Curves Running The Other Way
Thrust from the live engine acts along a line set several feet outboard of the fuselage. Multiply force by that distance and you have a yawing moment hauling the nose toward the dead side, continuously, for as long as the good engine makes power. The rudder is the only thing standing against it.
Here is why that yields a speed rather than a technique. The yawing moment tracks engine power, and power does not fade as the airplane slows. What the rudder can produce tracks dynamic pressure over the fin, and that collapses. One line roughly flat, one line falling away. They cross, and the airspeed where they cross is V_MC.
- Asymmetric yawing moment: near enough constant, set by power
- Rudder effectiveness: proportional to the square of speed
- Below the crossing point, full rudder stops being enough
- The airplane then departs directionally, not aerodynamically
The Conditions The Manufacturer Flew It Under
The Airplane Flying Handbook prints the condition list, and labels it as coming from historical part 23 section 23.149. Historical is the handbook's own word and it is the right one: modern part 23 was rebuilt around performance-based requirements and the old numbered paragraphs went with it. Controllability now lives at 23.2135. Airspeed indicator markings, once at 23.1545, now sit under 23.2610.
Every line on the list is picked to make the answer as unhelpful as it honestly can be, which is precisely what a certification floor is for. A pilot flying in kinder circumstances then has margin in hand instead of a surprise waiting.
- Takeoff power set on each engine to begin with
- Propeller controls where a takeoff would put them
- Weight and balance at their least helpful combination
- Gear retracted, flaps in the takeoff setting
- Trimmed for takeoff, airborne, ground effect gone
- Bank held to no more than five degrees
The Line That Runs Against Instinct
Gear retracted. Legs hanging below the fuselage add keel area behind the centre of gravity; the airplane weathervanes back toward the relative wind a little more willingly and the rudder gets help it never asked for. Raise the gear and the help departs, so the control speed rises.
Which means the book figure assumes the unhelpful case on that axis too. A real airplane, at a real weight, gear still down, will often hold direction below the published number and reach the stall first instead. That is a different failure and a considerably better one to have.
Which Speeds On A Twin's Airspeed Indicator Are Law?
Exactly one. We read 14 CFR 1.2 rather than assuming, and V_MC is the only one of these four that appears there. The others are flight manual speeds and instrument markings, set out for pilots in the FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook rather than fixed in the regulations, and an examiner enjoys asking which is which.
V_YSE — The Blue Radial Line
Best rate of climb once an engine has failed, shown as a blue radial mark on most airspeed indicators. This is the speed the airplane is held at while the drill runs. Look for it in 14 CFR 1.2 and you will not find it.
V_MC — The Red Radial Line
The one V-speed on this list that 14 CFR 1.2 actually defines, and the one 14 CFR 23.2135(c) obliges a manufacturer to establish for the most critical takeoff and landing configurations.
V_XSE
Best angle of climb after an engine failure — for clearing something rather than gaining height fastest. Also absent from the abbreviations listed in 14 CFR 1.2.
V_SSE
The slowest speed at which an instructor ought to be shutting an engine down on you deliberately. A training speed published in the flight manual, and nowhere in the regulations.
The Rule We Apply To All Four
No V-speed figure for any aircraft this school operates appears on this site. The number you fly belongs to that airframe, at that weight, on that day, and it lives in its flight manual. A figure typed onto a web page is not that number.
Where To Check Us
14 CFR 1.2 is two clicks away and lists every V-speed the regulations define. If anyone quotes you a V-speed as though the FAA set it, that list is how you find out otherwise.
Which Engine Is The Critical Engine, And Why That One?
On a twin whose propellers turn the same way, one failure is worse than the other, and the Airplane Flying Handbook explains the difference through P-factor. At a positive angle of attack each propeller's descending blade bites harder than the ascending one, so each engine's thrust effectively acts a little outboard of its own centreline. On the right engine that shifts the thrust line further from the fuselage; on the left engine it shifts it closer.
Follow it through. Lose the left engine and what remains is the right one, pulling on the longer arm, producing the largest yawing moment the airplane has to offer. Lose the right and the left carries on with a shorter arm and an easier problem. So the left is the critical one, and the certification speed is measured with that engine shut down.
Some light twins are built with counter-rotating propellers so both descending blades sit inboard. Those airplanes have no critical engine at all. Which arrangement a particular airframe uses is recorded in its type certificate data sheet and its flight manual, not on a web page, and it is a fair question to ask on the first morning because the answer changes the briefing.
What Does A Multi-Engine Rating Cost Here?
$5,100, set on the day you enrol, flown in a Piper Seminole this school owns and maintains. Below is the inventory behind that figure, because a price with no inventory attached is not really a price.
Multi-Engine Add-On
Airplane multiengine land, added to a private or a commercial certificate. Sold as a rating, not as a block of hours.
- ✓Seminole time flown to practical test standard
- ✓An instructor beside you for all of it
- ✓Systems ground instruction for the oral
- ✓Every engine-out, feathering and V_MC exercise
- ✓The endorsement 61.63(c)(1) requires
- ✓The figure holds if you need longer than average
Airline Career Track
When the twin is one phase of five rather than the destination, the whole route carries a single price.
- ✓Private, instrument, commercial, multi, instructor
- ✓Financing available from $2,500 down
- ✓Nothing repriced at a phase boundary
Multi-Engine Discovery Flight
A fixed-price first flight in the twin, instructor alongside. You handle the airplane and the time is loggable.
- ✓Hands on the controls of the multi-engine trainer
- ✓Credited in full against a program you enrol in inside a day
- ✓The cheapest way to test the idea before committing
Redbird MCX Session
Full-motion, fully enclosed, indifferent to weather. Good for rehearsing a failure without spending Seminole time on it.
- ✓Never cancelled for cloud or wind
- ✓Strong on flows, checklists and identification
- ✓Weak on landings, and we say so
What Sits Either Side Of The Twin On The Route?
The multi-engine add-on is rarely bought on its own. These are the two ratings most often held before it and the program most often bought after it, at the prices they are published at.
Private Pilot — Comprehensive
Sixty logged hours, five of them in the Redbird. The certificate a twin rating is most often added to.
- ✓55 hours single-engine, 5 hours full-motion simulator
- ✓50 hours dual, 10 hours ground
- ✓Books and materials included
Instrument Rating
Worth holding before the twin. Instrument tasks appear on the multi-engine practical test, and skipping them costs you a limitation.
- ✓Removes the risk of a VFR-only limitation on the new rating
- ✓Actual instrument conditions available at this field
- ✓Priced as a rating, not as an hour count
Commercial Multi-Engine
Inside the career track. The order in which you take the certificate and the twin rating is worth about thirty hours of twin flying.
- ✓250 total hours under 14 CFR 61.129
- ✓The sequencing argument is set out on the add-on page
- ✓Financing from $2,500 down
Should You Hold An Instrument Rating Before The Twin?
61.63(c) does not require one, and plenty of people add a twin to a VFR private certificate without incident. The reason to hold the instrument rating first is narrower, and more expensive, than most schools bother to explain. It lives in 14 CFR 61.45(b)(2).
That paragraph permits a practical test in an aircraft whose operating characteristics stop the applicant demonstrating every required task — and then says the certificate or rating gets issued carrying a limitation to match. For a multi-engine test flown by a pilot who is not instrument rated, the limitation printed on the certificate reads Airplane Multiengine VFR Only. Removing it later costs another practical test and another examiner.
So the rule of thumb is short. If you expect to fly instruments in a twin at any point, take the instrument rating first and sit the multi-engine test with nothing attached. If you genuinely will not, the limitation is harmless and today is cheaper. We will tell you which of those you are in before you enrol rather than afterwards.
Add The Class Rating, Or Earn The Certificate In The Twin?
Two different regulations, and only one of them counts hours. Working out which route a quote describes is the most useful thing you can do before comparing figures, because the two products are separated by roughly thirty hours of the most expensive flying available to you.
Add The Class Rating
14 CFR 61.63(c). An endorsement, a practical test, and no training-time floor of any kind.
Best foralmost anyone adding a twin to a certificate already held
- Governing Paragraph61.63(c)
- Required Twin HoursNone specified
- Extra Knowledge TestNone — 61.63(c)(4)
- Typical Aircraft Time10–15 hours
- Price Here$5,100
Earn Commercial AMEL In The Twin
14 CFR 61.129(b). A full commercial certificate whose aeronautical experience is flown in a multiengine airplane.
Best fora pilot who needs the multiengine time itself, not only the rating
- Governing Paragraph61.129(b)
- Total Flight Time250 hours
- Twin Time In The Named ItemsAbout 30 hours
- Extra Knowledge TestCommercial written required
- Where It Is PricedInside the career track
Side By Side
| Add The Class Rating | Commercial AMEL In The Twin | |
|---|---|---|
| Regulation | 14 CFR 61.63(c) | 14 CFR 61.129(b) |
| Minimum Training Hours | None specified | 250 total, about 30 of them in a twin |
| Knowledge Test | Not required | Commercial written required |
| Instructor Endorsement | 61.63(c)(1) | 61.39(a)(6) |
| Practical Test | Yes | Yes |
| Calendar Time | Ten to fourteen days | Months |
| Published Price Here | $5,100 | Inside $89,000 |
How Do You Make Two Multi-Engine Quotes Comparable?
Put the same five questions to both before you look at the totals. Most twin quotes are not comparable, and usually not because anyone is being dishonest — they describe different objects. One is a total. One is a rate. One is a rate with an assumed hour count beside it, which is a forecast wearing a price tag, and those forecasts run optimistic. No school is named on this site and no competitor's figure is printed here. What follows is a form you can take to any of them, this one included.
One: is the number a total you will owe, or a rate that gets multiplied later? Two: is the instructor inside it? Nobody earns this rating without somebody in the right seat on essentially every hour, and a quote that prices the airframe alone reads cheaper and settles dearer. Three: what changes if the syllabus runs five hours long? Get that answer in writing. Four: does the figure carry the systems ground instruction the oral will test, or flight time only? Five: which exclusions were volunteered to you, and which did you have to dig out?
Then one diagnostic question that resolves most large gaps on its own: is this quote for a class rating under 61.63(c), or for a commercial certificate earned in a multiengine airplane under 61.129(b)? Those are different products. The second necessarily contains about thirty hours of twin flying the first does not, so a much bigger number may be buying scope rather than charging markup. Worth establishing before you conclude anyone is expensive.
What Can A Stranger Verify About Twin Training Here?
A short rating needs an airplane that is genuinely available, instructors legally permitted to teach in it, and a price that stays where it was written. Each line below names the thing you would check it against.
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. Because it is used to give instruction for hire, it carries the inspection regime that rule imposes.
14 CFR 91.409(b)Make-And-Model Hours Behind Every Multi Instructor
Under 14 CFR 61.195(f) an instructor may not teach toward a rating in a multiengine airplane until holding five hours as pilot in command of that exact make and model. Small number, real gate, and a reasonable thing to ask about before you book anything.
14 CFR 61.195(f)Flight Instructors, So A Fortnight Does Not Stall On One Diary
Each carries a commercial certificate or an ATP, a flight instructor certificate above that, and a current medical. Each is also, legally, the pilot in command of your flight. A compressed rating collapses the moment the only qualified person is unavailable.
FAA Airmen Registry · 14 CFR 61.23Training Days A Year, Counted Rather Than Asserted
Derived from NOAA ASOS observations recorded at this field over 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, across four qualifying daylight hours. Tempo is what makes a short rating short.
NOAA ASOS via the Iowa Environmental MesonetPrices Held Behind A Contact Form
None. $5,100 sits on this page, itemised, with its exclusions printed above it and nothing to request.
Published in fullWhat This Rating Does, And What We Will Not Claim For It
The multi-engine rating at Airline Pilot Flight School is flown in a Piper Seminole the school owns outright, which is why it can be booked on consecutive days.
The rating adds airplane multiengine land to the certificate you hold. It does not raise that certificate's level: a private pilot who adds a twin rating is still a private pilot, with the same privileges and the same limits. Currency is counted separately too, because under 14 CFR 61.57(a)(1) the three takeoffs and landings inside the previous 90 days have to be flown in an aircraft that matches on category, class and type wherever a class or type rating applies.
Training 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 is published here. The operation is new, any such figure would be drawn from a sample too small to carry meaning, and inventing one would be worse than the silence. What gets published instead is the syllabus, the price, the hours people typically need, and the regulation behind every requirement stated above.
What People Ask Before Booking A Twin Rating
None, as a matter of regulation. Part 61's training-time floors do not reach an applicant adding a class rating, which is what 61.63(c)(3) says. In practice ten to fifteen hours in the airplane is the ordinary range, and instrument-current pilots flying consecutive days finish nearer the bottom of it.
$5,100, set on the day you enrol, flown in a Piper Seminole. It carries the flight time, the instructor on all of it, the systems ground instruction, every engine-out and V_MC exercise, and the endorsement 61.63(c)(1) requires. The examiner, your medical certificate and your own headset and charts sit outside it and are paid by you directly.
Not if you already hold an airplane rating at the same certificate level, because 14 CFR 61.63(c)(4) waives the additional knowledge test in that situation. There is still an oral examination at the practical test, which is a different animal entirely and goes deep into fuel, electrical and propeller systems.
It marks V_YSE, the best rate of climb available with one engine out, shown as a blue radial mark on most airspeed indicators. Worth knowing where the definition does not live: V_YSE is not among the abbreviations 14 CFR 1.2 defines. It belongs to the flight manual and the instrument face rather than to the regulations.
Because climb is funded out of surplus power and the surplus was never large. NTSB Safety Alert SA-081 puts it at a fifty percent power loss that can cut climb performance by at least eighty to ninety percent. A windmilling propeller then adds parasite drag which the FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook compares to the airframe's own, which is why feathering leads the drill.
It turns the blades edge-on to the airflow so the propeller stops rotating and stops working as a brake, dropping its parasite drag to roughly the minimum available. NTSB Safety Alert SA-091 adds the part most pages miss: below the rpm at which the start locks engage, feathering is no longer possible, so it has to be done early rather than tidily.
On a twin whose propellers turn the same way, it is the engine whose loss leaves the biggest yawing moment to hold. The FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook explains it through P-factor: on the right engine, the descending blade works further out from the centre of gravity, which hands that engine the longer arm and makes losing the left one the worse case. Counter-rotating installations have no critical engine at all.
Yes. 14 CFR 61.63(c) applies at whatever certificate level you already hold, so a private pilot adds airplane multiengine land and so does a commercial pilot. The training looks much the same either way. The practical test is flown against the standards for the certificate you hold, and that is where the difference shows up.
Ten to fourteen days at this field flying consecutive days, because nothing has to be booked at a testing centre first and the syllabus is short. Spread over weekends it stretches into two or three months and usually costs more effort overall, since asymmetric handling decays quickly between sessions.
61.63(c) does not require one. The reason to hold it first sits at 14 CFR 61.45(b)(2). That paragraph permits a practical test in an aircraft that cannot cover every required task, then issues the rating with a matching limitation attached. For a pilot who is not instrument rated that reads Airplane Multiengine VFR Only, and removing it later means another practical test.
No. No rate card for aircraft hire is published on this site for any airframe, and no hourly figure for the Seminole exists here at all. The twin is sold as the $5,100 rating and as the $499 multi-engine discovery flight, which is a fixed-price flight rather than a rate.
Nothing changes on the invoice. $5,100 is set at enrolment, and an unusually slow week is our problem rather than yours. That is only possible because the airplane belongs to the school, which is the thing worth checking in any quote you compare this one against.
One Flight In The Seminole Settles What A Brochure Cannot
Book the multi-engine discovery flight. You will handle the airplane, the time goes in your logbook, and inside ten minutes you will know whether a second engine reads to you as an asset or as workload. Enrol within a day and the fee comes off the program price.
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 →