Skyborne open day

07 Jun 2025

There was a free open day at Skyborne which is a relatively new school, only offering the integrated route. They have a number of links with UK airlines, primarily Ryanair, British Airways, and Jet2. BA had recently run a fully funded scheme the “speedbird academy” and chosen Skyborne as one of the schools that would deliver the training, so it was certainly worth a look when I saw there was an open day, especially as it’s only a couple of hours up the road.

As expected, it was a bit of a sales pitch, highly polished presentation at the beginning, selling the integrated course and an option to additionally complete a degree alongside it (for an additional cost of course). There was then the chance to essentially wonder around the building and chat to the students who where there on the day supporting the event. They were giving 1-1 tours to those who asked for it, which didn’t seem that organised, as i’m sure they would have had had to do it multiple times, it probably would have been better for them to have arranged groups at set times instead.

They also had a couple of the DA42’s in the hangar as a backdrop during the presentations, and one of them was then opened up for people to jump in and have a seat in the cockpit, there was quite a queue for that though so I wasn’t too worried and opted to skip it and chat to as many students as I could to find out a bit more about the actual flying.

However, the students were almost exclusively all still in the ground school phase, & only a couple of months in. There were a handful who’d been out to the fair weather location out in Florida, and done their basic flight training, but none who were more advanced than that, so it was difficult to get a good gauge of what the flight instruction was actually like. They did all highly praise the ground school instruction though & I did get the impression that that would be done to a high standard, and it’d probably be a great place to do it, with views out onto the airfield from the classrooms.

It was certainly an interesting day, but I didn’t leave sold on the school, partly because the presentation had put so much emphasis on how much ‘fun’ it was to be out in Florida, not because of the flying you’d be doing, but because of how much down time you’d have there, and the other interesting activities you can do while you’re out there. It just really felt like the whole day was pitched for people who were going to flight school in place of university, and sold like an uni alternative, offering a similar ‘student life’, rather than also catering for people like me who are now coming into it a little bit later in life.

For me the idea of burning money on rent and going to places like disneyland etc out in Florida, while only getting a couple of flights in a week, isn’t something which is very appealing any more - if I had to be away from home like that for flight training, i’d want to be flying as much as possible while I was there.

So, not for me this one I don’t think, will keep looking!

EGBJ