Freshly-certificated commercial pilots and flight instructors may be disappointed to find a major shortage of jobs they’re qualified for. Most entry-level flying jobs require a minimum of 500 hours of flight time for insurance purposes, but many, many more jobs—including all airline jobs—require 1500 hours or more.

Many low-hour pilots become flight instructors and teach their way to the 1500 hour mark. Unfortunately, this can take quite some time and doesn’t pay much. Many pilots wash out and find jobs in other industries before seeing the cockpit of an airliner or earning a job that can pay enough to make the training worth the financial return on investment.

The Flight School at Meadow Lake offers flight time-building, or renting aircraft and flying toward the goal of adding more experience to your logbook, more accessible and more affordable.

Investing in the experience required now in an expedited fashion can pay major dividends over the course of a career at a major airline—especially since you will be eligible much sooner than were you to flight instruct or take a low-paying, low-hour-requirement job. To this end, The Flight School at Meadow Lake offers bulk hour time-building packages to help pilots gain more-valuable experience, faster.

Climbing to 1500 hours logged is a steep and difficult journey. But at The Flight School at Meadow Lake, we’ve made it just about as affordable as it gets: while splitting time with another pilot (we’ll connect you) pilots can reduce the cost to as low as $55 per hour, per seat, wet (inclusive of fuel). This low cost means time-building from 250 to 1450 hours can be done for less than most schools charge for the cost of ratings in 250 hours.

Flight Training Cost-Calculator

Understanding the comprehensive cost of time-building can be annoying, so The Flight School at Meadow Lake put together a Flight Training Cost Calculator.

This calculator can help both those with no experience understand the full cost of training (all estimates include the cost of materials and testing fees) and assist those with some experience in how much their experience will reduce the cost of their time-building with The Flight School at Meadow Lake.

“Split time” refers to the time-logged when flying with another pilot.

A limited number of scenarios permit two pilots to log time while flying an aircraft. Only two generally apply to flying smaller aircraft.

The first is instructing: an instructor is the Pilot in Command of an aircraft, but a rated pilot may also log the PIC time when flying the aircraft.

The other, and more time-building-relevant scenario, permits two pilots without instructor credentials, to log time. One pilot flies the airplane—the pilot flying—and another acts as the safety pilot. The safety pilot only logs the PIC time when the pilot flying is simulating instrument flight or “under the hood” using a view-limiting device.

What exactly goes in each pilot’s logbook can be more complicated, but both pilots are typically able to log 95% or more of each two-leg flight.

“Split time” permits cost sharing, so while the aircraft is discounted to $110 per hour wet, for example, each pilot only pays $55, for their one of the two seats.

Yes! The Flight School at Meadow Lake does offer housing for time-builders and flight students on a weekly basis. Give us a call to discuss options.

Crashpad and single-room housing are available year-round from $200 per week. We provide a bed, sheets, blankets and towels. Access to the community spaces is included for all and we often barbecue during the summer or put on movie nights or other activities in the winter.

The Flight School at Meadow Lake recommends The Dead Reckoning Society for affordable multi-engine time-building. Housing with The Flight School at Meadow Lake is also available for those time-building with The Dead Reckoning Society.

Our Cessna 150, Pipistrel Alpha Trainer and Aeroprakt A22 aircraft are all available for time-building at time-building discount rates. Any other aircraft we manage are typically available, though at different rates.

A “wet price” in the aviation world means you’re renting, chartering or paying for an aircraft with the fuel included in the price. A “dry price” means the advertised price does not include fuel (and where applicable typically also doesn’t include the price of oil or other consumable liquids, such as coolant, de-icing fluid, etc.) All prices advertised and charged by The Flight School at Meadow Lake are wet unless specifically denoted otherwise.

Flying at The Flight School at Meadow Lake is on a 24/7 schedule, but scheduling priority is based on the price paid. Students who pay more for the aircraft during their lesson have first dibs on the schedule, but time-builders have as-available scheduling priority, so they may often pick up a cancellation. Time-builders with The Flight School at Meadow Lake often fly long hours at night on long instrument cross-country trips to improve the quality and experience of the time logged.

Time-builders may fly anytime an aircraft is not being used for training or by a renter who is paying full price—day or night. If a last-minute cancellation occurs, time-builders may often hop in an airplane, fly during the cancelled schedule block, and return it in time for the next student.

Yes, absolutely. Night time-building is a fundamental piece of what we do at The Flight School at Meadow Lake.

Yes, and we recommend focusing on sharpening instrument skills while time-building. Though the special light sport aircraft are not legally permitted to fly into actual IMC, they are IFR legal and may fly on filed IFR flight plans. Time logged under the hood is perfectly valid time to record in a logbook. 

Sometimes, yes. Those wishing to take a multi-day trip in an airplane should make a plan with our Operations team. Typically, the Cessna 150 is used for these trips.

We maintain our own fuel supply for our aircraft, so we typically limit trips to the aircraft’s out-and-back range. In the Pipistrel Alpha Trainer, this is approximately three hours. The Aeroprakt A22 has a round-trip range of roughly five hours and the Cessna 150 can go anywhere with fuel reimbursements limited to our fuel cost. Time-builders have taken three day or longer trips when booking in advance and the requisite availability.

We provide partners as part of our time-building program. We maintain a large group chat and make arrangements to pair partners up whenever necessary. Often, connections happen organically when pilots meet each other at the field or in our housing.

We feel it’s often better for pilots to meet each other, fly together and choose who they want to fly with so that they don’t feel forced to fly with someone they don’t want to. Still, if necessary, we step in to help schedule people directly if anyone ever needs assistance.

Absolutely. People arrive as a pair and fly together quite often. Each pilot must be checked out in the aircraft separately before pilots can fly together.

Yes, and even if we didn’t require it, all pilots, student or time-builder, should still have insurance to protect themselves. To fly with us, you don’t have to buy an annual policy, however. Monthly, weekly or even daily insurance coverage is available that meets our requirements. Every pilot must have a non-owned aircraft insurance policy (renter’s policy) with hull coverage of $50,000 and no-fault deductible coverage of at least $5,000. Typically, these policies also have a minimum liability coverage of around $1,000,000, but we are primarily concerned with the first two requirements. A QR code in our hanger will help you purchase insurance upon your arrival before you fly.

Potentially, yes. For those who want to pre-pay over 1,000 hours at one time, please contact our operations department.

The Flight School at Meadow Lake in Colorado Springs charges $149 per hour, wet, for aircraft rental but offers a five percent discount to those who pre-pay training packages and a deep discount to $110 per hour, wet for those flying as a part of its time-building program—that’s $55 per hour per seat, including fuel.

The time-building program is subject to pre-pay agreement and specific rules regarding the mission profile and aircraft availability.

Flight instruction is billed at $55 per hour and aircraft checkouts typically cost no more than about $370 (often less).

Our aircraft are available for rent and you may take a passenger with you while renting the aircraft if you so choose. However, our super-affordable time-building rates are so heavily discounted because, in part, the aircraft is piloted by two certificated pilots. We may make exception from time-to-time for specific cases, but we usually expect that time-builders paying the pre-pay rate are flying with other pilots in the time-building program and not bringing passengers. All pilots logging time in our aircraft must receive a checkout. Please note that no instruction is permitted in our aircraft except by our staff.

No instruction is permitted in our aircraft except by our staff. Any unauthorized instruction would not be insured, would constitute a violation of our policies and in many cases would actually be a criminal offense.

Pretty quick! We often see time-builders build over 50 hours in a week and upwards of 120 to 150 hours in a month. We typically ask you to take a break after 10 straight hours of turning and burning—for safety reasons, of course.

It is extremely rare that a time-builder can’t find an aircraft to fly. Student availability is limited to the available instructors and we do not accept students we do not have space for.

Contact our Operations team with specific availability questions.

Time-builders in our time-building program are subject to aircraft-available scheduling, which means that they may take any available aircraft and may be removed from a reservation if a student and instructor need the block of time. This rarely, if ever happens, but is a condition of receiving a reduced price when flying.

Yes! This is accomplished using safety-pilot rules. When two pilots fly a four hour trip with two, two-hour legs, each pilot serves as a pilot flying for one leg and a safety pilot for another leg. The pilot flying logs the time they’re flying as PIC, XC and simulated instrument time. While the pilot flying is under the hood, the safety pilot logs PIC time. They swap on the opposite leg or next block of flight time.

No! These airplanes have registration numbers and airworthiness certificates and logging time is no different than flying any other airplane.

If it fits, it flies—as long as the weight and balance is within limits.

That being said, while the Pipistrel Alpha Trainer can handle an average of about 220 lbs per seat, those over about 6’ 1” start to become less comfortable the taller they are. We have seen pilots as tall as 6’2” – 6’3” and weighing up to 250 fly the Pips.

We haven’t found anyone tall enough to be uncomfortable in the Aeroprakt A22, nor been able to pair anyone up to total a heavy enough load to get it out of weight limits.

The Cessna 150 can be a little less comfortable to get into and those with particularly long legs may run into some limits. Unfortunately, at high altitude, the 150 is severely weight-limited, so typically taller folks are too heavy to fly this aircraft. Our limits are even more stringent in the summer, but we typically see a 150lb per-seat average limit, with the heaviest fliers usually weighing in around 180lbs.

Yes, however you’ll need to convert a foreign license if you hold one, before you can fly N-registered aircraft. Students will need to complete a TSA-required screening process before they begin flight training through the TSA’s FTSP program.

We typically see over 300 flyable days per year. In the summer the density altitude limits midday and early-afternoon flights and thunderstorm-dodging is a skillset we train. In the winter, blizzards blow through in a day or two a couple of times per year, but typically we’re up and flying within a day.

Not particularly often and usually not more than a few hours. The longest downtime we’ve seen has been three to four consecutive days for extremely high sustained winds.

We typically have an oil change done within an hour and a typical 100 hour inspection done within twelve working hours—not often more than two days. We build our schedule around having one and a half aircraft always in maintenance for upgrades or repairs so that very few cancellations due to unscheduled maintenance affect our schedule.

After a mountain checkout, yes. The mountains are, however, extremely dangerous. Without extensive mountain training, we typically prohibit flight within five miles of terrain over 8,000 ft.