Flight training at Safety in Motion Flight Center

1. 1

   What do you charge per hour for flight instruction, and is ground instruction billed at the same rate?Missing from their site

   This is the number that is missing from the site. Ground is often billed separately and at a different rate.

2. 2

   Does the instructor rate change for the Instrument, Commercial, or CFI, or is it flat across everything?Missing from their site

   Plenty of schools charge more for advanced instruction. A flat rate quoted for the Private can climb later.

3. 3

   What is the hourly rate on your cheapest trainer, and which airplane is that?Missing from their site

   This is the number that is missing from the site, and it is the largest line on your bill.

4. 4

   Is that rate wet or dry, meaning does it include fuel?Missing from their site

   A dry rate and a wet rate are not comparable. Dry rates can run $40 to $60 an hour lower for the same airplane.

5. 5

   What does each aeroplane rent for, and what does instruction cost at Puyallup and at Olympia?Missing from their site

   The cost calculator on the site fills in an aircraft rate but leaves the instructor rate blank, and its numbers are not readable as text anywhere on the page.

6. 6

   Is the aircraft rate taxed on top, and does it differ between your two fields?

   The one figure the calculator does show is labelled a "Solo (taxed) Rate", which implies dual is billed differently.

7. 7

   Do you offer block rates or prepay discounts, and what is the refund policy if I stop partway?

   Block discounts are common and rarely published. The refund terms matter more than the discount.

8. 8

   What do you charge for the written test, the checkride, and the examiner's fee?

   The DPE fee alone runs $800 to $1,200 in most of the country and is almost never in a quoted hourly rate.

9. 9

   How many trainers and how many full-time instructors do you have right now?

   Availability decides your pace, and pace decides your total more than the hourly rate does.

What to compare their answer against

Not Safety in Motion's rates. The middle of what 19 Washington schools charge, to hold your phone quote against.

From the schools here that publish full rate cards, the same sample behind the Flight Training Cost Report. Safety in Motion is not in it.

What we checked

READ THIS BEFORE RE-CRAWLING SAFETY IN MOTION. Two traps. First, THE DOMAIN MOVED: simflightcenter.com now redirects to safetyinmotion.aero, and a crawl of the old host reports it unreachable. Second, the rates live inside a JAVASCRIPT COST CALCULATOR whose values are fetched at runtime and appear nowhere in the served HTML, so a 30-page text crawl of a 231-page sitemap correctly finds nothing. Rendering the page shows an aircraft rate of $157.30 labelled "Solo (taxed)" and an EMPTY instructor field, which is why this is still a partial and not a listing. Two bases, Puyallup and Olympia, and around twenty instructors.