What actually happens on a Discovery Flight at Grand Strand Airport

A Discovery Flight at Blue Horizon Aviation is your first real flight lesson, flown out of Grand Strand Airport (KCRE) in North Myrtle Beach with a Certified Flight Instructor in the seat beside you. You take the controls and fly the airplane yourself — that is the entire point of it. It costs $99 in a Cessna 172 or $199 in a Cirrus SR20, the time is loggable toward your license, and there is nothing to commit to afterwards.

Most people who book one have never touched an airplane. That is normal, and it is not something to be embarrassed about.

Before you fly

You meet your instructor at the school and walk the airplane together. This is the preflight inspection — the same walkaround every pilot does before every flight, on every airplane, for their entire career. Fuel, oil, control surfaces, tires, the things that have to be right before the engine starts.

You will hear what the flight is going to look like before you get in, and you get the chance to ask anything. Including the questions people feel silly asking out loud, which are almost always the good ones.

In the air

Once you are airborne, the controls are yours. Turns, climbs, descents — real flying, not a hand on the yoke for a photograph. Your instructor has a full second set of controls in front of them the whole time and can take the airplane at any moment, which is exactly why you can be trusted with it on day one.

You will get a look at the coast that only pilots get. That part tends to sell itself.

Which airplane?

Both options are a genuine first lesson; they are just different airplanes.

• Cessna 172 — $99. A four-seat, IFR-certified Skyhawk. More pilots have learned to fly in a 172 than in any other airplane ever built. Three of them live on our ramp.
• Cirrus SR20 — $199. A 215-horsepower Cirrus with a glass panel and CAPS, the whole-airframe parachute system. We hold the only CSIP-certified Cirrus instruction in the Myrtle Beach area, so if the Cirrus is what you eventually want to fly, you can start in it.

Back on the ramp

We shut down and log the flight time toward your license. Then we talk through what you did well — and if you want to know what the rest of a Private Pilot certificate would cost and how long it would take, we write the estimate out then and there.

We do not publish a flat price for a certificate, because the number genuinely depends on how often you fly. Two lessons a week is the pace that keeps you moving forward; long gaps mean re-learning last month’s lesson, and re-learning is the expensive part. Our simulator absorbs the weather and emergency work so that the hours you buy in the airplane are the ones that actually move you along.

If you would rather go home and think about it, that is a completely normal way to end the day. Nobody is going to chase you.

The next step

There is one: book a Discovery Flight, or call (843) 360-3690 and talk to an instructor first. We are open seven days a week, and five minutes on the phone is usually enough to know whether this is for you.