My Experience
From my point of view all these comments are correct. I flew in from Cessnock with my wife just under a year ago for 14 days holiday based in McLaren Vale (beautiful wines and country), we also did some local flying including a 2 day trip to Kangaroo Island (must see). Yes there was certainly some chaos in the circuit and I experienced poor / non-existent communications with other aircraft, it is certainly not the safest place I have flown to, but it was manageable with a diligent lookout. The little shop/ flying school had good food; the people were friendly and helpful. However over the period of our stay, we met several local pilots, some based at Aldinga and other’s from the surrounding areas and Kangaroo Island, from which we gained several perspectives and stories. Too many consistent stories from different pilots to just ignore as the odd disgruntled pilot, not everyone had a bad word to say about the flying school operators however about 80% of the pilots we met were of the same general opinion that these people cannot be trusted and have double standards. Several of the pilots I met had been approached or fined by CASA for incidents dobbed in by the flying school operators without every talking to them first (I don’t understand this, in Cessnock if you do something silly or wrong usually one of the instructor or experienced pilots will have a word in your ear and leave it at that, anyway that’s how we roll in NSW). Overall we had great experience in SA however the stories did make me very wary of the flying school operators.
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