Too Good to Be True

It was too good to be true. I was flying, learning more than I could ever imagine about aviation and not getting charged a whole lot for ground instruction. Sounds great right... Wrong. I consider myself a very integrity conscience person. So when my instructor wanted me to pay him cash instead of paying the flight school for a ground lesson that sent up a red flag. My instructor wanted me to pay him $25 cash instead of paying the flight school $55. Sounds nice right? Wrong again! Turns out, flight instructors only get paid about $15 of the $55 that I pay them. That's why Alex wanted $25 from me. He was making out. Also, he told me that I would need about 75 hours of ground instruction from him. NOT!!!! I talked with my friends on the AOPA forums and they told me that I should only need .1 here and .2 there of ground instruction after each flight. Alex wanted to charge me 75 hours x $25 = $1875 bucks for instruction that I didn't need. What did I do you ask... I canceled my future flights with Alex and went shopping for a new CFI.

I decided to check out Craigslist. I figured everything can be sold on Craigslist. Sure enough I found a guy in my area that is a free lance instructor. No fancy flight school, just him and a plane. I mean that's what it's all about right. Why pay more than you need to for the exact same instruction. My costs are going down dramatically from here on out. I'm going from 135$/hr at the flight school to $89/hr w/ him for the plane. Then instruction is $45/hr. But, I will not be needing 75 hours worth of ground time. I checked his references and tomorrow we have a meeting at Chandler Municiple. I'm pretty excited to meet him. He is a 10,000 hour former airline pilot, and has over 2,000 hours dual instruction given. I think this guy is going to be great. We exchanged email addresses and have been chatting ocasionally. Not sure if I will be flying tomorrow or not but I will report back here for sure. As for now... hitting the books!