Hey there, I’m Ben 👋
If you’re new to my posts, I’m Ben - a solo founder building profitable software businesses.
If you’re not new, welcome back!
As for this, this post, it’s going to be something different. I usually post about startups, software, and building a business.
I’m still doing all of that, but recently, I decided that I’d go after my childhood dream: becoming a pilot and learning how to fly an airplane.
Huh? Flying? Where’d that come from?
me irl
Yes. When I was 5, I told my mom I wanted to be a pilot when I grew up. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the flashing buttons in the cockpit that I wanted to press rather than a genuine desire to fly an aircraft, but in any case, it was the first thing I ever told anyone I wanted to do with my life.
I then promptly forgot all about that, took a quick 30ish-year detour to go to school for Computer Science, work in software, move to California, move to New York, quit everything, move to Thailand to start my own software company, and finally move back to NYC to continue running my software business and be closer to family and customers. Whew.
In any case, while I was over in Thailand, something started gnawing at me internally: the desire to learn how to fly was back! I was a bit surprised myself when I realized that was what I wanted to do.
To be clear, I don’t know why this feeling came back. Nothing spurred this for me. I didn’t have a concussion or a brain injury, and I didn’t go to a shaman in South America and do Ayahuasca for a week to get to this epiphany.
I simply got the idea in my head one day, and when I get an interesting idea in my head something in my brain latches on, so here we are.
Is there any logic to this?
I’ve thought about this a lot.
Maybe it’s that I’ve always had this interest in exploration and traveling and I’ve tried many different ways of scratching that itch: I have a motorcycle license and rode motorcycles for about 5 years, I tried sailing lessons for a week in Lake Tahoe when I was living in San Francisco and realized very quickly it wasn’t for me, I’ve gone paragliding, and of course I’ve been driving cars since I was 16 and riding bicycles before that.
But, being able to fly a plane is more interesting to me than all of those other modes of transportation because:
You can fly almost year round, weather permitting: On the other hand, boats typically need to be taken out of the water for the winter, and their performance is way more affected by windy conditions than planes are. For motorcycles, you won’t want to ride a bike when it’s cold outside as you will absolutely freeze when you get up to speed. And paragliding just isn’t a practical way to get around!
However, many planes tend to perform better when it’s a bit cold outside (caveat: obviously, you’ll need to avoid icing conditions/thunderstorms/etc). One reason for this, particularly for propeller-based planes, is that cold air is denser than warm air - so there are simply more air molecules for the propeller to push around, leading to better performance.It unlocks new places to go to in an efficient manner: grass airstrips in the middle of mountain ranges (after getting the necessary training for mountain flying of course), islands, and other “airplane only” destinations that aren’t accessible by car, friends that don’t live near major airports: all within reach and in a relatively short amount of time without dealing with congested major airports/TSA/etc. And to be clear, I think the idea of crossing the Atlantic over the course of a month or two in a sailboat while traveling around the speed of a bicycle is super cool, I just want a bit more speed than that when I travel on a regular basis.
It triggers the right things in my brain: flying is something that seems to flex the same muscles in my brain that programming does for me. It’s something about the procedural, problem-solving, “obsession over the details” aspects of flying that really hooked me. Besides, if our AI overlords make working in software useless and I decide that I no longer want to run a business some day, this is something else that I think I’ll be good at, although who knows if AI will take pilot jobs as well if it gets good enough. There’s already Garmin Autoland after all. Worst case scenario though: I learn how to fly and notice some problems that can be solved in a new industry, which is often how I come up with business ideas. So it’s a win-win.
Isn’t it expensive?
Pictured: my wallet after finishing flight training.
Yes.
If sailing a boat reminds you of the phrase Break Out Another Thousand - then for planes, think of Pouring Liquid Assets Nearly Endlessly (until you have nothing left, big RIP to your wallet).
Keep in mind, though, that you don’t have to own a plane to fly around the skies. You can always rent instead of own which is a lot more doable for infrequent flying - or if you do want to own an aircraft and fly more often, older Cessna 150s can be had for not-an-insane-amount-of-money: around $35K, or the same price as a new car. Of course, ongoing maintenance can be a different story if you don’t buy right.
But I’m getting off track here. This post is about learning how to fly, not owning an airplane outright. And to that end, there are some tips and tricks you can use to make your training much more efficient and cost effective that I’ll share with you now.
So then, where should one learn to fly?
I’ll caveat this by saying: this advice is only for those of you looking to learn how to fly in the US.
And in my opinion, the US is the best place in the world to learn how to fly. Why? Take a look at this sectional chart:
A sectional chart of the northeast/central US, courtesy of SkyVector.
Those dots surrounded by purple circles? Those are airports. There are even more of them that aren’t visible in this zoomed out map.
It might be surprising to learn that the US has the highest number of airports in the entire world. There are some historical reasons for this dating back to WW2, and that’s how the US ended up with so many airports.
In my view, this is a major safety factor, because if you have an engine that dies in the middle of the wilderness in, for example, Canada - you might not be within gliding distance to an airport depending on where you are. And airplanes turn into (heavy) gliders when you lose an engine.
In the US, that specific problem is greatly reduced by the sheer number of airports available. Of course, if you lose an engine shortly after takeoff or something like that, it’s a problem regardless, but I get some comfort in the fact that there are simply orders of magnitude more “guaranteed” landing spots available relative to other countries:
The massive difference between the number of US airports relative to Canada.
To illustrate what I mean, check the above map and note the stark difference in the number of available airports.
What are all of the steps to get a pilot’s license?
There are many steps to getting a FAA private pilot certificate (more commonly known as a PPL “private pilot license” — but the official term is Private Pilot Certificate). These steps can be done in almost any order if you do them Part 61 style, but I’ve listed the optimal order below:
Pass a medical exam with a special doctor certified to conduct aviation-related medical exams. These are called Aviation Medical Examiners (AMEs) in the US and only a few doctors in each state have the ability to do these exams.
Finish ground school. It’s what it sounds like - you learn all the material and regulations required to operate an airplane in the US. You can either pay an instructor at ~$70/h to teach you the material you need to know - or you can teach yourself on your own time. I would strongly recommend the latter, and I’ll go into why below.
Pass your FAA knowledge test. This is the Private Pilot Airplane test (test code: PAR). This is done at an in-person testing center with strict security in terms of what you can bring with you to the test. They certainly don’t like cheaters, so don’t try. Note that this is a timed, 2-hour test with 65 questions (5 of which are “trial” questions that the FAA is testing, they don’t count against your score).
Complete flight instruction (in the plane). There are a maximum of 40 required hours of training by law, but almost no one finishes in that amount of time. I’m just starting, but I expect to finish in around ~70-80 hours worst case scenario, not 40. There’s a mix of day, night, instrument, and cross-country flying required as a part of this.
Pass a fairly grueling practical test with a FAA-designated examiner. This is called the “checkride” where the examiner gives you an oral exam first to make sure you understand the material and can apply it to different situations that might come up while flying - then, provided you pass that part, they hop in the plane with you while you take off, do maneuvers that have to be completed within certain tolerances, and execute a cross-country flight. Then they award you with your certificate if you pass (you get a temporary cert in person, and a real one in the mail a few weeks later - similar to driver’s licenses).
So! Let’s dive into some tricks to make this all efficient and as cheap as possible:
The dreaded medical exam
Okay, it’s not that bad and this is probably the easiest part of the whole experience, but it’s still something you should be careful not to mess up.
It’s also something you should do first before anything else - if you start flying and then find out you legally can’t hold a pilot cert due to medical problems, you’ve wasted a ton of time and money!
And if you do get denied medical clearance by the FAA, it is a long road to convince them that you can safely fly an airplane sometimes lasting months or years, and because it’s a government agency, you can imagine just how slow this process is.
It will also cost you around $100-200 as it’s an elective doctor visit not covered by insurance.
So how do you not mess this up and avoid wasting your money?
By being prepared and picking the right doctor.
First, you need to fill out your complete medical history on https://medxpress.faa.gov/ and sign up for a medical. If you just want to fly for fun, the most you need is a 3rd class medical, so be sure to sign up for that one and not a 2nd or 1st class medical which are only useful for commercial and airline transport pilot operations.
I can’t say for sure what will disqualify you when filling out your medical history, but I’ve heard that if you take lots of anti-depressants, have had a history of depression/suicidal thoughts, or take lots of prescription drugs that affect your thinking it can cause a denial. It makes sense - you can’t reasonably expect to operate an aircraft while your thinking is impaired.
In my area in NYC, there are several doctors at major hospitals like NYU Langone that can technically perform AME responsibilities by law. But they also have 1 trillion patients per day and don’t spend most of their time doing these type of exams.
Don’t go to these doctors. What you want to do is find an AME who is:
A pilot themselves. Not a requirement, but it helps to have someone who understands what you’re trying to do.
Does many of these exams per week. The guy I went to could have done this type of exam in his sleep - his entire practice is just doing these special medical exams and nothing else and he was highly efficient.
Willing to advocate for you. If they have too many patients (or again, they’re not a pilot themselves), I’d be cautious about their willingness to help you deal with the FAA if there are any problems with your exam results.
I actually ended up renting a car and driving to an airport in New Jersey where one of these doctors was operating. Sometimes it’s worth putting in extra effort like this to get a good result.
Once you’ve identified a doctor, get mentally prepared for the exam. It’s not very challenging, but you need to make sure your blood pressure is reasonable (there’s a high threshold, I think it’s something like 155/95 mmHg but don’t quote me) and be mentally prepared for 3 tests beyond the blood pressure check:
Colorblindness test: this is a timed test, and it’s unforgiving. I was given an old iPad to do the test on, and it only gives you about 1 second per question to answer and tap next. If you don’t tap next in time, you get the question wrong. I’m not colorblind but this was still stressful because of the old touch sensor on the iPad and missing a few questions due to the next button not triggering when I tapped on it.
Vision test: instead of having to read letters off a chart like you do at the DMV, this one was a bit harder for me. I had to tell the examiner which part of a random symbol (not a letter) was “open”/”closed” for each column in the chart.
Urine test: you pee in a cup. Then they analyze your pee while you’re at the appointment to verify you don’t have diabetes, your kidney is functioning, etc.
If you pass all of those, you’ll know - and the examiner will immediately print your medical certificate.
Pro-tip: provided you’re under 40 at the time you receive your medical, it’s valid for 5 years - expiring at the end of whatever month that is 5 years in the future - so make sure to take this exam early in the month, ideally on the 1st of the month, to buy yourself more time.
How to finish ground school on the cheap
Once you’ve gotten your medical, the next thing I’d recommend is to get ground school and your FAA knowledge test out of the way. It’s one less thing you have to worry about while learning how to fly a plane, so I wouldn’t suggest learning how to fly the plane and doing ground school at the same time.
While you can pay an instructor to teach you the material, I wouldn’t suggest that. You can and should pass the exam on your own time to save a ton of money.
Do it all online as I did. For reference, it took me about ~60h (~2 mo) of self study to finish:
I have no idea why my average practice exam score was computed as 4,648% but I’ll take it!
This will save you a ton of money because you otherwise will have to pay an instructor to teach you for $70+/h.
Compare the costs involved here:
Classroom study with an instructor: $70/h * 60h = $4,200 ⚠️
Self-study online: $50-299 course.
That is a savings of at least $3,901.
Which ground school should I pick?
I have nothing to sell you related to online ground schools, so here's my honest recommendation:
The school you use doesn't really matter. They're all pretty similar.
Just make sure the one you go with gives you an endorsement to take the test when you finish it. It’s required for a certified flight instructor (CFI) to sign off that you’re ready to take the knowledge test, which is what that endorsement is for.
The cheapest option I’ve found for this is going to be FreePilotTraining’s premium course at $50 which includes an endorsement: https://www.freepilottraining.net/products/premium-ground-course-with-endorsement
I haven’t tried that one as I didn’t know it existed at the time, but FreePilotTraining runs an excellent YouTube channel that I used to help me study when I didn’t quite get the explanations in the ground school I went with, so I bet their premium course with the endorsement included is good as well.
The other commonly recommended options are Sporty’s or Gold Seal both at $299.
I personally did Gold Seal simply because I liked their cool domain name (groundschool.com) and it was fine, but Sporty’s has a superior practice test library and practice test taking experience.
Pro-tip: regardless of which ground school you go with, use Sporty’s test prep software (free, available here: https://courses.sportys.com/training/portal/demo/course/PRIVATE/testprep) to take a bunch of practice tests before your in-person knowledge test!
It’ll help you get a good score as the questions are similar to what you’ll see on the real test. Note that the test questions on the real test are different and include different wording, maps, and figures so you have to know what you’re doing and actually pay attention in ground school - but if you do well on the practice tests consistently and truly understand why you messed up when you get questions wrong, then you should be fine on the in person knowledge test.
Any tips to passing the knowledge test?
First of all, the passing score on this test is a 70% which is not very hard to do, but you want to get as close to 100% as you can. I personally got a 90%. That said, a pass is a pass and I wouldn’t bother retaking the test just to get a higher score if your first attempt was a pass.
The paper you get after passing the test. Includes items to study that you got wrong on the test.
Why should you care about getting a high score? Well, during your checkride at the end of your training, the FAA designated examiner might decide to grill you on whatever you missed on the knowledge test - they can see how well you did and which areas of focus you need to improve on based on what you got wrong.
So, don’t suck. 🙂 Get a high score. Now how to do that specifically:
During ground school, you will likely learn how to use an E-6B for wind correction and other calculations. It’s an old school paper calculator that’s very useful to know how to use, but it’s too slow for the timed nature of the knowledge test. Instead, buy an ASA CX-3 flight computer off Amazon for ~$150 with a 30-day return policy close to your exam date, then just return it after the test.
ASA CX-3. Superior to the paper E-6B for the knowledge test specifically.
It’s approved for use with the knowledge test just like the E-6B is - it’s just much faster and has easier built-in calculations for things like density altitude, cloud tops, wind correction, and more. There were 4-5 questions on my test where I was really glad I had the CX-3 with me.Read the questions carefully, double check your work, and obviously make sure you’ve done your studying before you arrive to take the test. Note that many test questions will have tricky answers that are ~5 degrees apart, so you really need to make sure you know how to use your plotter and get the exact right answer.
A helpful trick, because during the exam you won’t have a normal paper sectional to plot a course on: hold your scratch paper up to the monitor (it’s fairly transparent) and use your pencil to mark the points in your course. Then put the paper down, and use your plotter to figure out the angle between the two points → select the closest answer.Use the knowledge testing supplement to your advantage: This is a booklet you’ll get with the exam. I had one test question that asked me about the typical limits of a certain airspace around various airports. I couldn’t remember the exact figure, so what I did is opened the knowledge test supplement and found enough examples of airports in the airspace the question was asking about, and noted the maximum height of the shelf of that airspace in most of the examples I found. That ended up being the right answer!
How about picking a flight school for in-plane instruction?
Me flying around in a Piper Cherokee during my discovery flight
I’ve just started my lessons, so I’d take my advice with a grain of salt, but I’ll share what I looked for in a flight school and how I made a decision:
First, I signed up with a “discovery flight” at 3 different local flight schools - this is a fun flight you do with an instructor just to get a feel for flying and see how they run their operation.
During this process, interview the instructors you’re flying with as much as possible. See how they think about safety in particular.
To that point, something really important that I wanted to see from each instructor was a thorough safety briefing before taking off, and 2 out of 3 flight schools I went to didn’t do this!
In other words, the instructor should inform you what happens during an engine failure particularly at takeoff at various distances (what happens if it quits with runway remaining, without runway remaining, and at various altitudes), should be comfortable talking about picking landing spots, and how they manage safety during the flight.
Unbelievably, one of the instructors I took a discovery flight responded with “uh I don’t know about a landing spot around here, I’d probably just put the plane down in the river over there” when I asked him how he’d identify a landing spot if the engine quit, and he didn’t explain why. I never flew with that instructor again for obvious reasons.
More things to look for in a good flight school:
Part 61: you might be tempted to go to a part 141 school because of lower training requirements and structured classes. Those training minimums are irrelevant though, because almost no one finishes their private pilot cert in 40 hours anyway, so chances are having a 35 hour minimum instead of a 40 hour minimum doesn’t help you. Lastly, if you have a life and a job already, you won’t want to be a full time-student or be held to strict lesson plans - you’ll want the flexibility to train in whatever order, at whatever pace (a benefit if you’re a fast learner as you can finish faster), and whenever you want. That’s what Part 61 schools let you do.
DPE on staff: there’s a shortage of FAA designated pilot examiners right now. Having one on staff at the flight school you’re training at means you don’t have to wait an extra month and incur skill decay while you’re struggling to schedule a checkride at the end of your training or locate a DPE. This saves potentially thousands of dollars of aircraft rental costs (that you’d have to incur to shake the rust off) and many hours of time, not to mention minimal stress as you don’t have to find a DPE on your own.
Maintenance inhouse: I decided not to work with at least one school because they mentioned they had to fly their planes to another city to do maintenance. That’s downtime that will again lead to skill decay if the plane isn’t fixed quickly. The school I went with, on the other hand, is owned by a few A&P mechanics who do all of their own maintenance and inspections for the fleet of aircraft in a hangar at the airport the school is located at, meaning very minimal downtime if any.
An instructor you get along with: if your instructor gets you and is a calm and effective teacher, you’re going to have a much better time. If not, you might have to switch instructors in the middle of training which again wastes time and money you could be spending making actual progress. Get it right upfront.
“Wet” aircraft rentals: be careful about fuel surcharges (“dry” aircraft rentals do not include fuel), particularly in 2026 with fluctuating oil prices for obvious reasons. Since the cost of fuel fluctuates, you’re much better off renting a plane for training from a school that offers “wet” rentals meaning fuel costs are baked into the hourly rental cost. This is one less variable expense you don’t have to worry about.
Commute to the “practice area”: some flight schools operate in busy airspace and the practice area is many nautical miles away from the airport. That means you’ll take off and waste 30 minutes flying to wherever this practice area is on every lesson, which is a waste of money.
Stage check signoffs: “stage checks” are where another instructor besides your own evaluates your progress and gives you a signoff to move onto the next lesson. This is a good thing, in my view, as I can see how it would improve safety if your primary instructor is missing something - but it becomes a problem when only one instructor is the designated “stage check signoff” instructor at the school. Then you’re fighting with their schedule. So make sure multiple instructors at the school can sign off on stage checks, not just one!
So what’s next?
Whew! That’s about all I have for now in terms of tips on how to get started with flight training and save money. Even with some of the cost cutting measures I mentioned, it’s still a fairly expensive endeavor, but a worthwhile one in my view.
As for me, I’ve already passed my medical exam, finished ground school, and passed my FAA knowledge test. The remaining 2 items, and the hardest ones by far are the actual flight training which I’m just starting, followed by the checkride. After all of that, I might go do an instrument rating so I can legally fly through the clouds, but one thing at a time!
As for this blog, I might write a followup post about my experiences doing the flight training and passing the exam, and I might even use a GoPro to record my lessons. And I’ll certainly write a new post if I end up getting any cool aviation-related business ideas.
Until next time, I can’t think of anything else to say here, so: toodaloo!
