How do I learn to fly?
One step at a time.
The first step is to take a Trial Instruction Flight – a TIF. You ring the club booking number, 0425 251 939, arrange a time on a training day, usually Saturday or Sunday, come out to the Oaks airfield and an instructor will give you an initial lesson.
You’ll be flying for about twenty minutes. You need to be aged fourteen or over and be medically fit enough to hold a car driver’s licence. You’ll need to sign an insurance indemnity form.
The main pages on this web site has the rates, currently $150 per hour, fuel and instructor included. There are also details about getting to the airfield.
That’s enough to get started.
Advanced, safe and fun planes
What happens on a TIF?
In the TIF, the instructor will talk to you for a while, explain about the plane and what will happen. The instructor will take off and land the plane, the most difficult parts of any flight.
Higher up in the air, the safest part of flight by the way, the instructor will show you how to do some simple things; hold the stick, do a gentle turn.
Amazingly, you are flying a plane!
How is a TIF different from normal flying instruction?
The surprising thing about a TIF is how similar the experience is to normal flying lessons, and how useful a TIF is in determining whether flying, and this flying club, is for you.
Dedicated to the journey
Flying looks like fun, but isn’t it dangerous and expensive?
Flying is indeed fun, but it is also a very serious business. Training is the primary method used to reduce risk.
The hourly cost of an aircraft seems steep. Most time in learning to fly, however, is spent on the ground. Often it is more difficult to find the time required rather than the money, it depends of your circumstances. Do you have family or other commitments, do you have other interests?
In any case, flying Recreational Aviation type aircraft is much cheaper than flying General Aviation aircraft. Flying at ‘The Oaks’ is much cheaper than at fully commercial airports such as Bankstown.
So how much will it cost?
To be part of the sky
The minimum number of hours required for a Recreational Aviation Pilot Certificate is twenty hours. However, you have to meet a minimum level of competency. It is rare, unless you have previous aviation experience, to achieve this competency in twenty hours.
It does not reflect on your innate ability, or level of competence, to take longer to learn to fly. People learn at different rates, some of the best pilots took the longest to learn. Multiply the hourly rate by 20, then consider that as a starting point. Once you learn to fly, then what? You’ll probably want to fly more!
A Pilot Certificate is really only a licence to do more practise on your own.
How long will it take?
We only train on the weekends, second Thursdays and occasional Friday. Fired up with enthusiasm, you might want to get your licence in the shortest possible time.
This is great, and we fully support your desire. Having this goal will provide the motivation to see you through the ups and downs of training.
Learning to fly will be a challenge.
By training one hour on a weekend, it will take you the better part of up to a year to get your Pilot Certificate. There will be weekends when it is inconvenient for you to fly, and there will be weekends when the weather is unsuitable to fly.
Almost any age
What are the different types of aircraft?
In the Recreational Aviation category, there are a number of aircraft certified as suitable for training. These aircraft all have to be factory built and maintained by a level 2 LAME (Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer) maintainer (certified aeroplane mechanic). We train with ‘fixed-wing’, conventional lookng aircraft. Two seaters, one for you, one for the instructor.
The most popular type of plane in Australia to train in is the Jabiru. This is a very good Australian designed and built aircraft, but we don’t train in them.
We have a Foxbat A22 as our primary trainer.
If you have flown the Foxbat after other planes, the advantages become quickly apparent.
To belong to the fraternity of aviation
Once I learn to fly, can I just fly anywhere?
Unfortunately, flying light planes is often not a practical mode of transport.
Regular Passenger Transport (RPT), is a highly specialised activity. It transports lumps of warm, breathing meat long distances to specific, limited locations in a safe, economical and often unpleasant way.
The kind of aviation we are involved with, while superficially similar, has different goals.
First of all, the basic Pilot Certificate only allows you to fly within twenty five nautical miles of your airfield, without a passenger.
You need to get a cross country endorsement, and passenger endorsement to fly further.
You need to take into account the expense. The hourly hire rate of planes is not a ‘made up’ number. It really does reflect the cost of running the plane; the capital cost, the maintenance, the fuel.
You can reduce the capital and maintenance cost by building and maintaining your own plane, this will consume even more of your time. Some people don’t see this as a burden, but as part of their enjoyment of flying.
The kinds of planes we fly have smaller fuel tanks, and are quite a bit slower than passenger jets, or even larger general aviation aircraft.
To give you an idea of range and duration, our Foxbat A22 has a large 90 litre fuel capacity. It has a comfortable cruise speed of 80 knots (one knot equals one nautical mile per hour). At that speed, it will use about eighteen litres of fuel an hour. Typical of this class of plane, the fuel is premium unleaded.
This is quite an advanced plane, many don’t have this kind of range or speed.
Then there is the weather. Recreational Aviation is daytime VFR, or Visual Flight Rules, only. You can’t fly when it is raining, or dark or too windy.
There are surprisingly few days when it is unsuitable to fly, but they can and will happen when you have promised to be somewhere; really, really want to be somewhere, or have to get home for work the next day.
You may not have a willing passenger. Light planes fly at much lower altitudes than jets, and tend to react to gusts. Part of the fun of flying are maneuvers such banked turns. For a passenger unused to the sensations of light planes, these can be disconcerting, even leading to motion sickness.
On top of all these things, you cannot generally fly in certain controlled airspaces, that is around major airports or military zones.
Having poured water all over dreams of flying to work, or to the family farm, there are many cases of experienced pilots popping up to Cessnock or Tarree to visit friends or for a weekend away.
There are surprising amounts of airspace in major cities that you can fly in. CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) provide some handbooks that show how you can have a great flight up Sydney Harbour and around the Northern Beaches.
The study of weather is a fascinating part of aviation. The ability to go to places that normal commercial aviation doesn’t go to, the ability to fly when you want, without many restrictions, the views when you do fly, these things more than make up for the limitations.
Friendly club atmosphere. One for all, and all for one.
Why learn to fly?
Flying is a complicated business. I don’t mean the business of pointing a plane in the air, of getting it off and onto a runway safely.
The mechanical skills and in-flight judgement required for an ordinary circuit are difficult at first, but can be mastered quickly.
There is a lot more to flying than just these simple mechanical aspects. For that reason, your goals will likely change over time. Your initial reasons for learning to fly are unlikely to be the reasons you continue to fly.
These reasons will be individual, specific to you. To discover what they are, you have to experience the first part, learning to fly, first.
When you start learning to fly, you may have certain ideas and hopes in your mind. It may be that no-one directly disabuses you of those hopes and ideas.
People are not being dishonest in not contradicting you. Who is to say whether you will magically learn to fly in twenty hours flying time? It is possible. You may have enough money to fly a super advanced composite fibre $120,000 plane, one you can afford to fly every second day. It is possible, but not likely.
What is likely is that you will enjoy flying, enjoy discovering something about yourself you never knew.
There is a chance that flying will become an important part of your life, and will completely change the way you look at life, yourself, and the relative importance you place on things.
Having experienced the joy of receiving the gift of flight, the joy can be redoubled in sharing.
The destination is another dimension in yourself.
