JRH a few questions for you. Do you pay your instructors or do they work as private contractors that have to be approved by the school? Do you require your students to carry non owned insurance or do you simply cover all the planes under your own insurance and add that into the per cost hour? Do you have your own mechanics that have a salary or do you pay the local mechanic a hourly rate for each job?
Instructors are full time employees.
Students are encouraged to carry renters insurance after they are licensed, but they are not required to. Our insurance covers all of our operations.
A local maintenance shop does all of our maintenance work at a slightly discounted rate.
At skypark all instructors are private contractors but they must be *hired* by the school. Basically that Dans way of keeping employee cost down. No social security to pay, benefits etc. The students have to pay the instructors directly. But you still must be *hired* or you are not allowed to teach at the airport. I've actually been told this is illegal by a lawyer but we won't get into that here.
That's fine, but it also supports my point that going the cheaper way may or may not be better, but it's definitely different. This sounds like a situation where the whole deal is somewhat less stable than a flight school with centralized control over employees. Who knows if it's worth it or not, but a customer should know the difference.
Skypark does have a insurance policy on their airplanes but to keep cost down from what I understand it is the bare minimum. To compensate for this he requires all renters to carry their own non owned insurance and he has set hull values for each type of airplane. In the past people told me this had loopholes and maybe it does but we lost two airplanes this year due to pilot error crashes and both were replaced by the pilots insurance in a matter of weeks without any cost to the flight school so if there is loopholes we got lucky this time around. From a business standpoint I would imagine this would be less costly though because if you insure your own airplanes and just add that to the hourly rate, if your planes dont fly the number of hours that you estimated to cover the insurance then you loose money that way.
Again, that's all fine, as long as a person understands what they're agreeing to. Training with this type of arrangement is fine, but if something happens and the insurance company doesn't want to pay, that's part of the deal. I just don't want somebody thinking that they're somehow outsmarting the system, or getting a steal of a deal, or whatever, by using this setup versus another. The fact is, there are tradeoffs. As long as the customer accepts the tradeoffs, great!
Skypark has one A&P/IA that is on salary and two or three contractors who come to do specialty work when needed. I'm not sure but I would believe this would cut cost down when compared to having to pay the hourly rate to a local mechanic for every job.
Having salaried mechanics on a large fleet makes a lot of sense, I'll give you that.
However, my original points about various maintenance "philosophies" still stands. Some mechanics will let more things slide than other mechanics in the name of saving a buck. Although labor is a significant overhead, parts can't be ignored. Aviation parts are amazingly expensive. A new exhaust pipe? On a car, maybe $50. On a plane, could be $600. I've seen individual bolts that are worth maybe $5 in a hardware store go for $75 on a plane. That's why some mechanics will be more hesitant to squawk a problem than others, because almost all parts are expensive.
Whether a philosophy of deferring repairs is a good thing or not is debateable and depends on a person's perspective. Also, I'm not saying the mechanics at Skypark have a certain attitude because I don't know them. I just know the types of things that go on at a lot of airports across the country.
I'm only trying to keep people informed about their options and what the possibilities are, that's all! If a person looks at the overall package and decides to go for it, by all means, I want them to be happy. But it's important to know that not all things are created equal, and getting a private license for $4000 at one school is not going to be the same experience as getting one for $9000 at another school. Sure, the license has the same privileges at the end of the day, but there are very different (good, bad, and otherwise) paths to get there.
anic: . We even had a DE in the past request a student meet her at another airport because she didn't feel comfortable. But I will admitt I do enjoy flying into Ashlands 3500 strip much better in the cherokee at night. Night landings are skypark are interesting at first because the runway lights are so far off the runway it makes the runway look really short and fat haha:banghead:
