Discovery Flight For One — 120 Minutes
Two hours is a syllabus lesson, not an introduction
At $399 this is the longest single-engine assessment flight we sell, and it is long enough to cover ground that a first lesson normally leaves for the third or fourth.
| Price | $399 |
| Time booked | 120 minutes |
| Aircraft | A single-engine trainer from the fleet |
| Who is flying | You, from the left seat |
| What is logged | Dual instruction received, in your name |
| Counts toward | The 40 hours of flight time in 14 CFR 61.109 |
| Enrollment credit | The full $399 if you enroll within 24 hours |
| Published weight limit | 180 lb |
| Field | Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), Van Nuys, CA 91406 |
What two hours makes room for
A departure, a full airwork block, a short leg away from the field with a real navigation problem attached to it, and a return to the pattern with time left to fly the approach yourself under instruction. That is four lesson objectives, and a two-hour booking is the shortest slot that holds all four without rushing any of them.
It also exposes something a shorter flight hides. Flying is tiring in a way that surprises most people, and the quality of your control inputs at minute one hundred is not the quality of your inputs at minute twenty. Knowing how you fly tired is more useful information than knowing how you fly fresh.
Who this is the right booking for
Someone treating this as the first paid hour of a career change rather than as a gift or an afternoon out. If you are budgeting a full private pilot program, two logged hours at the front of it is not an indulgence — it is two hours you do not buy again later.
The honest limitation
Two hours does not make you a pilot and it does not shorten the certificate. The minimum in 14 CFR 61.109 is 40 hours, and what most people actually need is more than the minimum. This flight moves the counter by two.
Buy this one for the training value, not for the view.
Checkable facts about this operation
- Every type in the fleet is school property, serviced on site. Instruction for hire triggers the 100-hour interval written into 14 CFR 91.409(b), and we would rather carry that cost than argue about it with an owner.
- Eleven instructors, matched to students one at a time and changeable if the pairing is wrong. Each holds a CFI alongside a commercial certificate or an ATP.
- A Redbird MCX lives on the field. It is enclosed, it sits on a motion base, it holds FAA approval, and a standalone booking is $189.
- The flyable-days figure for this field is 355, counted from NOAA ASOS records over the year to 1 August 2026 rather than estimated from a brochure.
- Fixed prices, published in full. The figure you agree at the start is the figure at the end, which is the point of buying a program rather than hours.