"Mike (Remove X's to reply)" wrote in message
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Sorry for so many questions. I'm just excited! If these questions are
highlighted in a FAQ, please point the way.

There probably are some good FAQ type stuff at www.beapilot.com and
www.aopa.org . I suppose a Google search on "student pilot FAQ" or
something like that would be helpful too.

In addition to the other replies, I'd like to point out that when they
mention "per hour" charges, those are calculated only on the time the
airplane is actually *running*. That's why Jim and John mentioned minimum
daily fees. You can go somewhere, park the plane, have a good time, and
then fly back and you are only charged for the time you spent operating the
airplane.

The "minimum daily fee" business is that many places will charge you some
minimum number of hours (I've seen as few as one and as many as four) if you
have the plane overnight. Usually, the fee would be charged for every full
24 hour day you had the airplane out, though different places have different
policies.

So, for example, say you want to take a ski trip. You schedule the airplane
for pick up at noon Friday, drop off at eight pm Sunday. The airplane would
be out for two full 24 hour periods, so a place that had a two hour daily
minimum would charge you no less than four hours of rental.

In a situation like that, if you spend more than the minimum amount of time
flying the airplane while you have it out, then you're fine. You'd pay the
same as if you'd flown all those hours in the same day. So the only tricky
thing is to make sure that the longer you schedule the plane for, the
farther you fly.

All of this "minimum daily rate" stuff isn't going to be relevant until
after your training's over (most likely), but the difference between being
charged for the time you have the plane versus the time you fly the plane is
something that a lot of people new to flying don't realize exists. Just
thought I'd try to clear that up.

Pete