Luxury Discovery Flight For Two — 90 Minutes
Ninety minutes is where the avionics start to matter
$549. An hour in a glass-panel airplane is mostly spent being shown the panel. Ninety minutes is long enough to make it do something under your own hands.
| Price | $549 |
| Time booked | 90 minutes |
| Aircraft | Cirrus SR22 Turbo — turbocharged, glass flight deck, CAPS whole-airframe parachute |
| Who is flying | One of you, from the left seat |
| What is logged | Dual instruction received, for the person flying |
| Hourly rate | Not published for this airframe |
| Published weight limit | 200 lb per person, 400 lb combined |
| Field | Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), Van Nuys, CA 91406 |
What the extra half hour is spent on
Setting up a leg on the flight deck and then flying it. Loading a destination, reading a moving map against what is actually outside the window, watching the engine page while a turbocharged engine is asked to climb. None of that fits in a sixty-minute slot once the departure sequence at a Class D field has taken its share.
It is also enough time to be shown, rather than told, why the automation is not the same thing as skill. An autopilot flying a heading is not a pilot flying a heading, and the difference shows up the moment the picture stops matching the plan.
Who books the ninety over the sixty
People weighing the Premium program at $22,500 against the Comprehensive at $15,900, and people who already fly and want type familiarity rather than an introduction. If neither describes you, the sixty-minute booking is the better value and we would rather sell you that.
The downside, stated plainly
Glass makes an early student slower to build a scan, not faster. The instrument scan you develop when the information is pre-digested is a weaker one, and it has to be rebuilt later. That is a real cost and it is not on the invoice.
Automation is a tool for a pilot who already has the skill. It is not a substitute for acquiring it.
Facts you can check
- 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.