Skyborne open day school visit
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 DA-42’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, as there was also a Da-42 simulator that was up and running, giving people the chance to have a go, so I queued for that and was able to do an approach into Gloucester in it!
I was most interested in chatting to the students themselves to get a good idea of what the school was actually like behind the flashy sales pitch, and I was particularly interested in how good the actual flight instruction was, however, the students that were there, were almost exclusively all still in the ground school phase, & only a couple of months into it. 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, mostly because the only option is to do it full time residential, which isn’t a good fit for me, but also during the presentation, they 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 to fill that time. It just really felt like the whole day was pitched for people who were going to flight school in place of university, and was being 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 just having lots of extra free time out in Florida, while i’m sure would be fun, just isn’t something which is very appealing any more especially if only getting a couple of flights in a week - I’d rather be flying as much as possible while I was there.
So, not sure it’s for me this one, but it’s the first one I’ve visited, so will keep looking!