mtv wrote:From the perspective of a CFII, I'll offer this suggestion:
You're trying to do too much with one airplane. You're going to need a fairly well equipped airplane for the instrument training, and for the Commercial, you're going to need either a TAA or a Complex aircraft. Your $30K plane isn't going to meet any of those criteria.
SO, Buy a good "starter airplane", that's VFR only, but in reasonably good shape. The best you can find for your price point. A Pacer or early 172 or?? fits this price range.
Now, do your IFR training in a rental. You can't operate your own airplane for $75 an hour. So, use the FBO airplane for that. In the meantime, you're building time on YOUR schedule in your own airplane toward the Commercial, which is going to require total time. ALL the time as PIC counts towards that.
Then, when you're ready to prep for the COMM, find another rental, or use the school plane if it's TAA qualified. You'll need ten hours in that and you'll have to take the checkride in it.
All the while, you'll be building time in your personal plane. May take a little longer, but the point is, NO $30K airplane is going to even come close to what you want to do.
Take advantage of that $75 an hour rental.....Seriously, that's a DEAL!
MTV
I will chime in to agree with MTV and also offer one correction to his post. Since the change in complex to complex/TAA, the checkride does not have to be in that airplane. After you have the required 10 hours of complex or TAA, you can take the commercial checkride in any airplane, it does not have to be complex or TAA. So you could do the commercial checkride in your own airplane or in the school IFR machine. A flight school I have spent time at went from having their commercial checkrides in a C182RG to using that for the 10 hours and then having the checkride entirely in C150s or 7GCBCs or C172s or whatever.
