How Leasing with Concordia Aerospace Works:

The industry standard is to charge clients off of the Hobbs time with fuel costs included. A Hobbs meter simply counts all minutes the engine is running and displays them in tenths of an hour. Although the Hobbs time is often used for logging flight time, we feel charging off of Hobbs time gives people a monetary incentive to rush through checklists and always fly at full throttle to keep their Hobbs time as low as possible. This is not only bad for the engine, but it can also create unsafe piloting habits in our opinion. Since this is a conflict of interest when it comes to safety, Concordia Aerospace charges your rental rate based on the Tach or tachometer time. Please note that your flight instruction rate is still based on Hobbs hours, since these better reflect actual flight hours and hourly workers should be paid based on actual hours.

Tach time does not run at the same speed as Hobbs time. At low RPMs, a Tach counter ticks significantly slower than real time. Only at a predetermined flight RPM value does Tach time count normally. This means that if you fly at a lower power setting, say 2200 RPM, your flight hours will cost less than if you were to fly at a higher power setting, like 2500 RPM. In this way, you have more control over the cost of your hours and have a way to save money if you need to. Not flying at full throttle continuously also reduces wear on the engine which helps with maintenance costs, and, ultimately, translates to a lower rental fee than it otherwise would be.

In addition to paying off of the Tach meter, paying for fuel is your responsibility (obviously this also makes our rental cost significantly lower since it is a dry lease rather than a wet one). We do this for several reasons, chief among those being that you need to know how to fuel an airplane. It also gives you more options, like being able to fuel at a lower self serve rate, or, if you are short on time, you could request full service and have an FBO, like AvServe, fuel the plane for you. This is yet another way Concordia Aerospace can give you more control over the cost of your training compared to the traditional structure.