Our Fleet
Six airframe types, every one of them owned outright rather than leased in from a member or a broker, and arranged as a progression rather than as a menu. The order you meet them in is the order the certificates arrive in, and each type sits on the ramp because one specific phase of training needs it.
What Aircraft Will You Actually Fly?
Six types: Cessna 162 Skycatcher, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Diamond DA20, Cirrus SR22 Turbo and Piper Seminole. Which of them you meet depends entirely on the phase you are in, and most students touch three or four of them across a full career route. Every one of these airplanes belongs to the operation, which is a duller fact than it sounds and a more consequential one.
Ownership decides availability, and availability decides how fast you finish. A school flying leased or member-owned airframes schedules around somebody else’s priorities and somebody else’s maintenance decisions. When the airplanes are yours, a squawk is a decision you make on Tuesday rather than a negotiation you open on Tuesday.
Here is a position, since these pages take one. Fleet variety is oversold as a feature. What matters is whether the airplane you are booked into is on the ramp on the morning you need it, and after that whether it is the right airplane for the thing you are learning. Six types is broad enough to carry a career route properly and narrow enough to keep serviceable.
What Is Each Airplane On The Ramp For?
Each of the six exists to serve a phase. Where a type carries no hourly figure here, that is deliberate rather than an omission: the twin and the Cirrus are sold inside programs, and this site publishes no rental rate card for anything at all.
Piper Warrior
Primary training, and the type most students spend a first phase inside. Low wing, forgiving, and honest enough that a mistake shows up rather than being quietly absorbed by the airframe.
- PhasePrivate pilot
- Rate$179 wet, enrolled students
- ConfigurationSingle-engine, fixed gear
Cessna 162 Skycatcher
The lightest airframe here and the least demanding to operate. It suits early lessons, and it suits a student who wants the smallest possible hourly cost while learning to handle an airplane at all.
- PhaseEarly training
- Rate$179 wet, enrolled students
- ConfigurationSingle-engine, fixed gear
Diamond DA20
Primary training with a different feel in your hands: light on the controls, a bubble canopy that leaves almost nothing hidden, and cheap to run. Useful for building stick and rudder habits before anything gets complicated.
- PhasePrivate pilot
- Rate$179 wet, enrolled students
- ConfigurationSingle-engine, fixed gear
Piper Arrow II
The complex airplane. Retractable gear and a controllable-pitch propeller, which is the traditional way a commercial applicant meets the complex or technically advanced element that 14 CFR 61.129 asks for.
- PhaseCommercial
- Rate$179 wet, enrolled students
- ConfigurationSingle-engine, retractable
Cirrus SR22 Turbo
The glass-panel airplane, and the one a Premium student flies from the first hour. It carries a whole-airframe parachute and a cockpit philosophy unlike anything else on this list.
- PhasePremium private pilot
- Sold AsThe $22,500 program
- Hourly FigureNone published
Piper Seminole
Multi-engine training, and nothing else. Everything the twin rating consists of happens here, including the engine-out work that is the entire reason the rating exists.
- PhaseMulti-engine rating
- Sold AsThe $5,100 add-on
- Hourly FigureNone published
Why Does Owning The Airplanes Change Your Schedule?
Because it removes a negotiation from the middle of your training. A leaseback airframe has a private owner whose consent, insurance and tax position all sit between a discovered fault and a repair. That arrangement works, and it also adds a person who has to be reached before anything happens.
A school that owns its airplanes grounds one on its own judgement and returns it to service on its own judgement. The cost of that is capital, which is why fewer schools do it. The benefit is that a part is ordered on the afternoon the squawk is written rather than the following week, and it is your calendar that the difference lands on.
It also decides how many of a type sit on the ramp. Several airframes of one class is the practical insurance against an unserviceable airplane, and it is worth far more to a student on a fixed timeline than a seventh type would be.
What Does Flying These Aircraft Cost?
By program, not by the hour. Every figure below is fixed at the point you enrol and not one of them is a range. The single hourly number on this site exists so that an enrolled student can add flying beyond a syllabus without reopening a conversation about money.
Airline Career Track
Every phase from a first logged hour to a flight instructor rating, priced once and held at the figure you enrolled on.
- ✓Five phases under a single number
- ✓Financing from $2,500 down
- ✓Nothing repriced at a phase boundary
- ✓Part 61 from the first hour to the last
Private Pilot — Comprehensive
Sixty hours in the logbook: fifty-five airborne, five in the box, fifty flown dual, and ten hours of ground school beside them.
- ✓60 hours logged
- ✓5 simulator sessions
- ✓10 hours of ground school
- ✓Every book and training material included
Instrument Rating
Phase two of the career route, and the rating that changes how you read weather more than any other single step on the ladder.
- ✓Flown in the same single-engine airplanes
- ✓Priced as a rating rather than a block of hours
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
Multi-Engine Add-On
The class rating that opens twin flying, flown in the Piper Seminole this school owns and maintains.
- ✓Ten to fifteen hours is the ordinary spread
- ✓Sold as a rating, not as an hour count
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
Which Airplane Would You Like To Sit In First?
Before any program, there is an hour. Each flight below seats you at the controls of an airframe from the ramp above, an instructor alongside, and each is loggable dual instruction rather than a scenic ride.
Assessment Flight
Sixty minutes in a single-engine trainer, with you flying it. The instructor demonstrates, then hands it over, and you find out what the work actually feels like.
- ✓You fly it yourself for the greater part of the hour
- ✓Loggable dual instruction
- ✓Credited in full against a program you enrol on inside a day
Multi-Engine Discovery Flight
The same idea in the twin. A fixed-price first flight in the Piper Seminole rather than an hourly rate, because no hourly rate exists for that airframe here.
- ✓Hands on the controls of the multi-engine trainer
- ✓Loggable dual instruction
- ✓Credited in full against a program enrolled on inside a day
Redbird MCX Session
Not an airplane at all. The full-motion device on the field, indifferent to weather, and the cheapest place to repeat a procedure until it stops being difficult.
- ✓Never lost to a low ceiling
- ✓Strong on flows, checklists and instrument scan
- ✓Weak on landings, and we say so on its own page
What Happens When Your Airplane Is Unserviceable?
You move to another airframe of the same class where one is free, and that substitution is the practical argument for holding several of a type rather than one of each. It is also the reason a fleet page is worth reading before you enrol anywhere: a school with one airplane per category has no answer on the morning something breaks.
Where nothing suitable is available the lesson is rescheduled, and sometimes a simulator session is the better substitute. Sometimes it is not. A session is a good replacement for procedural work and a poor replacement for anything involving handling, and your instructor should tell you which of the two your lesson was going to be.
Ask about this on the assessment flight. How many airplanes of the type you would be flying, and what happens when one of them goes into the hangar. It is a question of fact rather than of opinion, and a vague answer tells you something about any school, this one included.
In What Order Will You Meet These Airplanes?
Four stages, and almost nobody flies all six types. The sequence below is what a student on the full career route sees, and a private pilot who stops at the certificate meets only the first one.
A Fixed-Gear Single, From The First Hour
A Piper Warrior, a Diamond DA20 or a Cessna 162 Skycatcher, depending on availability and on what your instructor judges suits you. This is where the handling is learned, and it is where a private certificate is finished. You may ask to change type.
The Same Airframe, With The View Taken Away
An instrument rating is flown in the aircraft you already know, which is deliberate. Nothing about the airplane should be novel while you are learning to fly it on the instruments, and a familiar cockpit removes one variable from a hard phase.
The Complex Single
The Piper Arrow II arrives during commercial training, bringing retractable gear and a propeller control. It is the airplane that turns a checklist from a habit into a discipline, because two of the items on it will now bite.
The Twin, Last
The Piper Seminole comes at the end, and it is a rating rather than a phase. Ten to fifteen hours is the ordinary spread, and it is the shortest thing on the ladder because everything else you needed was already learned somewhere above.
Glass Panel Or Round Dials — Which Should You Learn On?
Round dials, for most people, and the argument is not nostalgia. A traditional panel makes you build the instrument scan yourself, and a scan built by hand transfers to any cockpit you sit in afterwards. A glass display does a great deal of that assembly for you, which is superb once you have the underlying skill and a hindrance while you are acquiring it.
The counter-argument is real too. If your route ends in a modern cockpit, and it probably does, then time in front of a primary flight display is time you will need eventually. The question is only whether you want it in the first fifty hours or the second, and there is a defensible answer either way.
Both are on this field, which is the reason it matters here rather than in the abstract. The Cirrus SR22 Turbo is a glass airplane and it is the Premium program aircraft at $22,500. The rest of the single-engine ramp is conventional. What we would say plainly is that buying the glass airplane before you have soloed is usually the wrong order, and that the Premium program exists because some students want it rather than because everyone should.
The Six Types, Summarised
If you read nothing else on this page, read this. One line for each airframe, and the phase it belongs to.
Cessna 162 Skycatcher
The lightest thing on the ramp. Two seats, simple systems, and the least demanding introduction to handling an airplane that this fleet contains.
Piper Warrior
The workhorse single. Low wing, four seats, fixed gear, and the type most private certificates here are finished in.
Diamond DA20
A light, responsive two-seater with a bubble canopy. Excellent visibility and very little between you and the consequences of a control input.
Piper Arrow II
The complex airplane. Gear that retracts and a propeller you control, arriving during commercial training and changing what a checklist is for.
Cirrus SR22 Turbo
Glass panel, turbocharged, and carrying a whole-airframe parachute system. The Premium program airplane, flown from the first hour on that program and sold at $22,500.
Piper Seminole
Two engines, and a syllabus built around switching one of them off. The multi-engine rating is bought at $5,100 and no hourly figure for this airframe appears anywhere here.
Can You Choose Which Airplane You Train In?
Within reason, yes, and the honest limit is availability rather than policy. If you want to fly the Warrior and the Warriors are all booked at the hour you can attend, you will be offered something else or a different slot. Nobody is served by a student who waits three weeks for a preference.
There is one preference we will argue with. Students who want to start in the Cirrus because it is the most impressive airplane on the ramp are usually buying the wrong first fifty hours, and we would rather say so in advance than take the enrolment quietly. The Premium program is honestly priced and it is not the default for a reason.
What you should insist on is consistency inside a phase. Bouncing between three types while you are learning to land is a way of learning to land three times, and the airplane is not what is supposed to be varying at that stage of a syllabus.
How Are These Aircraft Maintained?
On a hundred-hour cycle plus an annual, because 14 CFR 91.409 requires exactly that of an airplane used to give instruction for hire. What follows is what those two rules mean week to week, and what we will not tell you because we cannot evidence it.
The Two Intervals, And How They Interact
14 CFR 91.409(a) puts every aircraft on an annual inspection within the preceding twelve calendar months. 91.409(b) adds the hundred-hour cycle for airplanes carrying people for hire and for those on which instruction is given for hire, which covers every airplane a student here will touch.
The hundred-hour interval carries one narrow flexibility, and it is not the one people assume. A limited overrun is permitted, but only while flying to the place where the inspection will be carried out, and those excess hours are then subtracted from the following interval rather than forgiven. The cycle does not quietly stretch.
- An annual inspection inside twelve calendar months
- A hundred-hour inspection on instruction aircraft
- Overrun permitted only to reach the shop
- The overrun deducted from the next interval
What We Will Not Claim About Safety
No accident record, no incident record and no safety statistic of any kind appears on this site. Those claims are common in this market and we are not entitled to one: the operation is new, and a clean record across a short period is a statement about sample size rather than about how an operation is run.
What can be said is what the rules require and what ownership makes possible, and both of those are checkable by a stranger. Anything past that would be decoration, and decoration on a maintenance page is worse than silence.
What Is Not On This Site, And Why
There is no rental rate card here and no page advertising aircraft hire, because what this school sells is training. The single hourly figure published anywhere is $179 wet in a single-engine airplane for enrolled students, and it covers the airframe and the fuel it burns rather than the person in the right seat.
No hourly figure is published for the twin or for the Cirrus. One is bought as the $5,100 rating; the other is flown inside the Premium program at $22,500. An hour rate for either would describe a transaction nobody here is offering.
What Can A Stranger Verify About These Airplanes?
Five things you could confirm without taking our word for any of them. No rating, no review and no safety statistic appears among them, because none of those would be honest from a school this new.
Airframe Types, Owned Rather Than Brokered
Cessna 162 Skycatcher, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Diamond DA20, Cirrus SR22 Turbo and Piper Seminole. The airplanes belong to the operation, so the maintenance calendar is ours rather than a lessor’s, and a repair does not wait on an absent owner.
Inspected under 14 CFR 91.409(b)Hours Between Inspections On Any Airplane Used To Instruct
Not a policy of ours and not a promise. It is the interval the regulation imposes on any airplane on which instruction is given for hire, and it stacks above the annual inspection that every aircraft receives in any case.
14 CFR 91.409(b)Instructors Who Fly These Airplanes
Each holds a commercial certificate or an ATP, an instructor certificate above that, and a medical in date. Depth of staff is what keeps a fleet flying: an available airplane is worth nothing on a morning when nobody qualified is free.
14 CFR 61.183 · 61.23The Only Hourly Figure On This Entire Site
Wet, single-engine, for a student already enrolled, covering the airframe and its fuel. There is no rate card, no dry rate, no walk-up rate and no hourly figure at all for the Seminole or the Cirrus.
Published in full, not quoted on requestPrices Held Behind An Enquiry Form
None of them. Every program figure is printed on this site, nothing is offered as a spread, and the number you sign for is the number you read before you called.
Stated rather than impliedLearn In The Warrior, Or Learn In The Cirrus?
The two private pilot routes that differ by airplane rather than by hours. Both end in the same certificate. They do not cost the same and they do not teach the same first fifty hours.
Comprehensive, In A Fixed-Gear Single
Sixty logged hours in a Warrior, a DA20 or a Skycatcher, with five sessions in the full-motion device.
Best foralmost everybody, and certainly anybody who has not soloed yet
- Price$15,900
- Logged Hours60
- AircraftFixed-gear single
- PanelConventional instruments
- Simulator Sessions5
Premium, In The Cirrus SR22 Turbo
Forty logged hours flown in the Cirrus from the first lesson, on a glass panel, behind a whole-airframe parachute.
Best fora student who already owns or intends to buy this class of airplane
- Price$22,500
- Logged Hours40
- AircraftCirrus SR22 Turbo
- PanelGlass primary flight display
- Simulator Sessions2
Side By Side
| Comprehensive | Premium | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $15,900 | $22,500 |
| Logged Hours | 60 | 40 |
| Hours Flown Dual | 50 | 30 |
| Ground School Hours | 10 | 3 |
| Simulator Sessions | 5 | 2 |
| Books And Materials | Included | Included |
| Certificate Issued | Private pilot | Private pilot |
What Is Wrong With This Fleet?
Two things, and both are worth knowing before you enrol rather than afterwards. Neither is a secret and neither is unusual, but a fleet page listing only strengths is an advertisement rather than a description.
The first is that six types is a narrow selection. There is no tailwheel airplane here, nothing certificated for aerobatics and no turbine. If you want a tailwheel endorsement or upset recovery training, you will do it somewhere else, and we would rather tell you that now than after you have signed for a program.
The second is the Cirrus, and the criticism is about sequence rather than about the airplane. Learning behind a glass panel in a fast, slippery, well-equipped machine tends to produce a pilot who is good at managing systems and less practised at the raw handling an examiner will ask for. The Premium program is honestly priced and it is not where most people should start.
Ask on your assessment flight which airplane you would be booked into and why. If the answer is vague, that tells you something about any school, this one included.
What This Page Does Not Claim
No safety record, accident count or incident statistic appears on this page or anywhere else on this site. The operation is new, and any such figure would describe how little time has passed rather than how the operation is run. What is published instead is the inspection regime the regulations impose and the fact that the airplanes are owned outright.
Airline Pilot Flight School trains under part 61 of 14 CFR, at Van Nuys Airport. It is not an airline, it is not owned by one, and no carrier holds a cadet program, pathway agreement or hiring arrangement with it. Nothing on this page offers you an interview, a job or a salary, and no carrier is named anywhere on this site.
No pass rate, no graduate count and no rating of any kind is published here. Any such figure would come from a sample too small to carry meaning, and inventing one is the easiest lie available in this industry. What gets published instead is the syllabus, the price, the hours and the regulation behind each requirement.
What People Ask About The Airplanes
They are owned by the operation rather than leased in or brokered from private owners. That matters mostly for scheduling and maintenance: an airplane belonging to the school is grounded and returned to service on our decision rather than on somebody else’s, and that is what keeps a full-time syllabus moving.
Every hundred hours of time in service, plus an annual inspection within the preceding twelve calendar months. The hundred-hour cycle is imposed by 14 CFR 91.409(b) on any airplane where instruction is given for hire. A limited overrun is permitted solely to reach the place of inspection, and those hours are then deducted from the following interval.
The airplane and the fuel it burns, in a single-engine type, for a student already enrolled in a program. It does not include the instructor, whose time sits inside the program price. It is the only hourly figure published anywhere on this site and it is not a rental rate offered to the public.
Because neither is sold by the hour. The Seminole is bought as a $5,100 rating; the Cirrus is flown inside Premium, priced at $22,500. An hourly figure for either would describe a transaction that nobody here is offering.
On the Standard and the Comprehensive it is a Piper Warrior, a Diamond DA20 or a Cessna 162 Skycatcher. Premium students fly the Cirrus SR22 Turbo from the first hour. Which of the three you fly depends on availability and on what your instructor judges suits you, and you can ask to change.
The Piper Arrow II covers the complex or technically advanced element inside commercial training that 14 CFR 61.129 asks a commercial applicant for. Retractable gear with a controllable-pitch propeller remains the traditional way to meet it, and it is the type that turns a checklist into something consequential.
This site does not advertise aircraft hire and publishes no rate card for it. What is sold here is training. If you are already enrolled and want to add flying outside a syllabus, the $179 single-engine wet figure is the number that applies to you.
No. Six types, all nosewheel, none certificated for aerobatics. If you want a tailwheel endorsement or upset recovery training you will need to go elsewhere for it, and it is better to know that before you enrol than to discover it two phases in.
You are moved to another airframe of the same class where one is available, which is one of the practical reasons for owning several of a type rather than one of each. Where nothing suitable is free the lesson is rescheduled. A simulator session is sometimes the better substitute and sometimes not, and your instructor should say which.
No, and you should be suspicious of a new school that does. A short clean period is a statement about how little time has passed rather than about how an operation is run. What is published instead is the inspection regime 14 CFR 91.409 requires and the fact that the aircraft are owned outright.
Keep Reading
A Ramp Is Easier To Judge In Person Than In A Photograph
Book an hour, fly the airplane you would actually be trained in, and walk past the rest of them on the way back to the office. An hour on the ramp tells you more about a school than any page can, and this one is not trying to pretend otherwise.
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 →