This Review Overall Rating
I have been out to Fly-in Spain on 3 occasions, the first trip to revalidate my PPL and the two subsequent trips for hour building.
If you’ve only ever flown locally then travelling to a different country to a new flight school might seem daunting, however you are given a good set of briefing notes before arrival and the instructors will show you round the facilities and make sure you are familiar with all the local procedures. You will also encounter lots of other British and Irish students out there so you won’t feel isolated/alone in any way!
Fly-in Spain is based in Jerez, and in the same airport as FTE which dominates most of the airport campus. Fly-in looks a little rough around the edges; different paint schemes on all the aircraft, outdated classroom facilities etc. However, I guess the savings they make in not having a brand new fleet is passed onto you in very reasonable tuition costs.
They operate a mixed-fleet: mostly c150s and c172s, but also warriors and a Seneca, all aged but I never experienced any maintenance issues with them.
Instructors were all good and usually very accommodating, it gets quite busy at times but you can normally tell them what time of day you want to fly and they will work round you.
Weather is pretty good all year round so you don’t get many unflyable days even in the winter.
For hour building there’s not that many other airports to land at and there’s quite a lot of restricted airspace so you tend to keep flying the same routes and areas so I wouldn’t suggest doing all your hour building there.
(Pre-covid) Ryanair fly direct to Jerez from Stansted but you also have Seville an hours drive to the North and Malaga 2.5 hours to the west which are both well served airports from most of the UK. It’s pretty useful to have a car in Jerez, and I found that off season (jan-feb) I could rent a car for less than £1/day from Malaga! The school do have a couple of apartments they let out to students, but I found because I went out of season that hotels were almost the same price (roughly £30 per night inc breakfast). Tip: book on Ryanair Rooms it’s basically a portal on the Ryanair app that links into hotels.com, but you get flight credit equivalent for your hotel spend. After my 3 trips out there I had enough flight credit for two return flights that I used for my summer hol.
One thing I did find quite a faff was although the school was adjacent to the apron you had to do a long walk and go through security every time you flew (all your baggage through a scanner, passport check, flight plan verified with the tower). You also had to file a flight plan every time and check that it was received ok. So this procedure took at least 40 minutes on top of your usual pre-flight briefing.
Overall I had a positive experience there. The training is good value, wx is great and I enjoyed the adventure of going to a different country to train. My only recommendation would be to not do all your hour building there as you very quickly plateau with the lack of challenges..
Course(s) taken:
General
Aircraft
Practical Training
