Comprehensive Private Pilot Program At Van Nuys Airport
Sixty hours, one price, and the program most people should buy
$15,900 covering 60 logged hours, 50 of them dual. It is priced above the regulatory minimum because almost nobody finishes at the regulatory minimum, and we would rather sell you the realistic number at the start than the optimistic one.
| Price | $15,900, fixed |
| Flight time logged | 60 hours |
| In a single-engine airplane | 55 hours |
| In the Redbird MCX | 5 hours |
| Dual instruction | 50 hours |
| Ground instruction | 10 hours |
| Books and training materials | Included |
| Aircraft rate inside the program | $179 an hour, wet, single-engine |
| Regulation | The regulatory floor is forty hours under 14 CFR 61.109; this program sits above it |
| Field | Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), Van Nuys, CA 91406 |
The argument for buying more hours than the law requires
Forty hours, the figure carried in 14 CFR 61.109, is a floor rather than an estimate. It describes the least flying that could produce a competent private pilot under ideal conditions, and it was written for a training environment with less airspace complexity than the one above this field.
Van Nuys is a Class D airport under the Class B shelf around Los Angeles International, with jet traffic in the pattern and a radio environment that takes a new student real hours to stop finding frightening. Those hours have to come from somewhere. In this program they come from the price you already agreed, rather than from an invoice in month five.
Where the extra twenty hours go
Fifty of the sixty are dual, which is the number that matters. More instruction, not just more airplane. The additional 3 hours in the Redbird MCX go to instrument scan, radio work and emergency procedures — the things a simulator handles more efficiently than an airplane — and the extra ground instruction goes to the written exam and to the parts of weather and airspace that a three-hour ground block cannot cover honestly.
The remaining flying goes where every instructor knows it goes: landings, crosswinds, and the two or three maneuvers that each individual student finds hard.
Comprehensive against Standard, as a total rather than a sticker
Forty logged hours costs $10,900 on the Standard program. Sixty costs $15,900 here. The difference is $5,000 for twenty hours of flying and twenty hours of instruction, which is a lower rate per hour than buying those hours separately after a Standard program runs out.
So the honest comparison is not $10,900 against $15,900. It is $10,900 plus whatever you buy afterward, against a fixed $15,900 agreed today.
What is not in the price
Examiner and written-test fees, a medical certificate, and your own headset. Those belong to you. We name them because a program that pretends they do not exist is a program with a surprise in it.
Most students finish above the minimum. This program is priced for the student who will.
What stands behind the number
- Ownership rather than access: the six airframes belong to the school and are looked after in our own shop, which is why the schedule does not depend on somebody else's asset.
- Eleven people instruct here. Each carries a CFI, each holds either a commercial certificate or an ATP, and each keeps a medical in date under 14 CFR 61.23.
- The Redbird MCX here moves and is fully enclosed, which makes it worth using for scan and procedure work. $189 gets you a session of it.
- 355 days a year clear the minima we train to, 3,000 ft and 5 sm, on NOAA ASOS records for this field. What that measurement does not model — wind, and thin layers the sensor misreads — is published alongside it.
- The price list is the website. Nothing is quoted privately, nothing is discounted for signing on the day, and no figure appears here as a range.
- This is Part 61 training. We publish a syllabus, a price and an hour count, and nothing about a track record the business has not had time to build.