Before I can begin my commercial course, I need to increase the number of hours I have. You can't take the commercial skills test before you have 200 hours in the logbook and 100 P1 (command) hours, including a qualifying 540km cross-country flight. As I currently have just 67 hours of flight time, I need to add just over 100 before beginning the 25 hour course. At my home airfield a Cessna 152 costs £107 per hour to hire, with landing fees of between £10-20 at any airfield away from Stapleford. This means that the 100 hours I need to do would cost in excess of £11,000 here in the UK, plus I would be subject (even with my new IMC rating) to the UK weather.
As many trainee pilots do, I therefore decided to take a trip to the US, where the weather is (generally & hopefully) much better, and more importantly the flight costs are significantly lower. The C152 I am renting from Long Beach Flying Club is just $85 an hour, which is just £50 so a significant saving. I managed to get my flight for just £500 and accommodation will set me back no more than £1500 for the month and by a good stroke of luck, we managed to get someone to house-sit our place for a similar amount, so the trip itself is almost cost neutral and the flying is less than half what it would be here....and let's face it a month flying around California in the sunshine has got to be better than a month in London!
So my bag is packed, I've got my FAA "piggy-back" licence and I've booked my checkout at the Long Beach Flying Club for Sunday. LA here I come......
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