Hourly rate.

[Cat Driver]

You sure are a difficult person to deal with photofly especially considering you are not even involved in flight training.

Before we go any further with this you will have to find another flight instructor in Canada who got to the point in their career that they could deal directly with the underwriters at Lloyds of London, I did.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to deal directly with underwriters instead of brokers photofly?

[Class 1 Instructor]

Like everything else in life there is an imperfect relationship between what something costs and what it is worth. The issue IMO is more fundamental.

First the instructor must be able to teach. This sounds obvious but there are plenty of extremely experienced pilots who are terrible teachers. What matters at the end of the course is not how well they can fly it is how well the student can fly and that speaks wholly to their effectiveness as a teacher.

Secondly obviously experience really does matter for any level of training, even ab initio. Also obviously the deeper the depth and breadth of that experience the more the instructor had to offer.

Finding the above two qualities in an active instructor is IMO fairly rare. The good news is there are a small but active group of guys/gals who view instructing as a calling and stay in it even when they don't really have to. If you can find one of these then you are very fortunate and should happily pay them what ever they want. The irony is that since this instructor cohort almost invariably have a full time job not in instructing ( eg airlines) or outside of aviation they are not in it for the money and will often charge less than they should. Money is not the currency they want it is hard work, enthusiasm and the desire to be the best pilot you can be, or in other words to fully take advantage of the skills and knowledge they have painstaking acquired over many years of flying and want to see passed on. Instructing is fun when you have a great student so if you are lucky enough to get one of these guys I highly recommend you make it worth his while to train you.

Unfortunately the kind of instructor I have described is not common and most freelancers are Class 3 F*uckps who where canned from their schools because they couldn't even meet the very low standards of your average FTU.

[Colonel Sanders]

there are plenty of extremely experienced pilots who are terrible teachers

I had no idea you were acquainted with my father! He's
a superb stick (F-86, F-104, Pitts) but a typical military
flight instructor. You know. Horrible.

I like telling this story. It's the early 1970's and I'm 10
years old, and with the help of cushions that allowed me
to manipulate the flight controls, I am doing circuits with
my father in our family Maule M4-210C (still have it) at
Toronto Island.

No headsets, no boom mikes, no intercoms - all that
stuff was decades in the future - just one godawful
noisy 210hp constant speed prop tailwheel aircraft
that most licenced pilots can't fly, and here I am,
10 years old, trying to tame this fire-breathing dragon.

I turn base, and I'm high and slow. All I needed to do
was to lower the nose and convert a little altitude to
airspeed. My father, the fanged ex-fighter pilot, leans
over to me and shouts in my ear,

"If you don't do something, we're going to die."

I'm 10 frikken years old, remember.

[Class 1 Instructor]

there are plenty of extremely experienced pilots who are terrible teachers

I had no idea you were acquainted with my father! He's
a superb stick (F-86, F-104, Pitts) but a typical military
flight instructor. You know. Horrible.

I like telling this story. It's the early 1970's and I'm 10
years old, and with the help of cushions that allowed me
to manipulate the flight controls, I am doing circuits with
my father in our family Maule M4-210C (still have it) at
Toronto Island.

No headsets, no boom mikes, no intercoms - all that
stuff was decades in the future - just one godawful
noisy 210hp constant speed prop tailwheel aircraft
that most licenced pilots can't fly, and here I am,
10 years old, trying to tame this fire-breathing dragon.

I turn base, and I'm high and slow. All I needed to do
was to lower the nose and convert a little altitude to
airspeed. My father, the fanged ex-fighter pilot, leans
over to me and shouts in my ear,

"If you don't do something, we're going to die."

I'm 10 frikken years old, remember.

That explains a lot

[Beefitarian]

Ah, and instead of shelling out money for a profesional shrink you keep telling us. Typical cheap pilot.

[Colonel Sanders]

What matters at the end of the course is not how well they can fly it is how well the student can fly and that speaks wholly to their effectiveness as a teacher

Here is helmet cam footage from a student of mine, flying wing on me:



I had the honour of teaching him from hour zero. Told him he could
fly anything he could get his hands on at the airport as long as it had
a tailwheel. Forbid him to fly anything with a nosewheel unless it
could teach him something exceptional (e.g. C421B, L39).

Soloed at age 14 in that very same Maule M4-210C I flew 42 years ago

If people do what I tell them to do, and they work hard, I will
guarantee that they will be phenomenal pilots, because that's
all I am interested in creating. The Walmart FTU's can teach the
hamburger pilots that fly the plastic nosewheel trainers with a
square yard of glass on the panel (shrug).

[Beefitarian]

I probably would have paid you more per hour before you told me $60 was too expensive Colonel. Do you remember that?

[Colonel Sanders]

Memory is the 2nd thing to go, Beef. Can't remember the first!

PS Did I tell you I bought 5 cases of Aeroshell 15w50 oil
recently? With tax, it was within a burger of $500

[Beefitarian]

If you did I forgot.

$100 a case huh? That's pricey.

[trey kule]

Can't remember the first!

The first?

You promissed to pay me the $1000 you owe me. No need to thank me for the reminder, just send the money

Why would students choose for a freelance instructor that charges 2 or 4 times the amount charged in a flying school

Good question, and one anyone considering hiring a freelance should consider.

Also, is it really that important that an instructor with 10k of aerobatics or fighter jet experience is sitting in the right seat when a beginning pilot, who can't even fly straight and level , takes his first lesson ?

As others have already posted...Nope..but I think most of the freelancers posting here dont do ab initio instruction.. Speciality stuff, where the experience counts alot. When the aircraft or sim you are using costs a whole bunch of money an hour, the student is learning to fly to the edges of the perfomance envelope , or the plane has some procedures or idiosycracies that are specific to it, it is good to have someone in the right or rear seat. who has been there , done that. And can get the job done well in the minimum hours.
As someone else mentioned, I have seen instructors climb into the right seat of this or that plane without even one hour of experience on type, and try to teach someone to fly it...
The ability to teach is definitely important...And a bit of the instructor leaving their ego on the ramp.
You will generally find that experienced pilots who are good at instructing touch the controls very very little and are good at explaining what is important and what is not.. Usually they stick to the basics and dont try to enhance the training syllabus based on what they deem to be important.
You will seldom see experienced instructors with the "hey watch this" attitude or the need to demonstrate their exceptional skills.

[Shiny Side Up]

I don't freelance often, but when I do my rate is subject to change depending on what you want me to do and how much I like you. I will barter my service on occasion - I did a check ride on a guy's plane once for a twenty kilos of honey. I think I got the better of the deal, that stuff's expensive!