Airplane Rides In Los Angeles: You Fly It, From $229

An airplane ride in Los Angeles costs $229 for 60 minutes at Van Nuys Airport, and the person flying it is you. You sit in the left seat, your hands are on the controls, a flight instructor sits beside you with a second set, and the hour is logged as dual instruction toward an FAA pilot certificate whether or not you ever come back for a second lesson. That is the ride this page is about, and it is not the same product as a sightseeing tour.

Everything below is one of our discovery flights. If you want the background on what a discovery flight is, how the hour is structured and what the instructor does, start with our pillar guide to discovery flights in Los Angeles. This page is the shopping list: every ride we offer, every route, every price, every weight limit, side by side, so you can pick one in about five minutes.

What An Airplane Ride Means At Van Nuys

There are three ways to get into a small aircraft over Los Angeles, and they are genuinely different products that happen to look similar in photographs.

The first is a commercial air tour. You are a passenger, someone else flies, and the operator runs the flight under 14 CFR 91.147, which covers non-stop passenger-carrying flights for compensation or hire that begin and end at the same airport within a 25-statute-mile radius. That rule requires a Letter of Authorization from the FAA, a drug and alcohol testing program and a defined operating area. We do not hold that authorization and we do not sell air tours.

The second is a helicopter tour, which is the same idea in a rotorcraft: you ride, you photograph, you land, and nothing is logged.

The third is a discovery flight, which is a flight lesson. It is conducted as instruction, the instructor is the pilot in command, and you are the one manipulating the controls for most of the hour. It is legal for us to sell because we are selling instruction, not transport, and it is the reason the hour goes in a logbook. The practical difference for you is that you spend the flight doing something rather than watching. Most people find that is what they actually wanted.

People search for this in a dozen ways: airplane rides near me, plane rides, small plane rides, airplane tours, air tours, sightseeing flights, private airplane rides. At Van Nuys they all resolve to the same booking. Our page on what a discovery flight is covers the instructional side in detail, and helicopter versus airplane compares the two aircraft types honestly.

Every Airplane Ride We Offer, Priced

These are our published prices. There is no fuel surcharge, no booking fee and no per-person add-on hidden at checkout. The price you see is the price of the aircraft and the instructor for that block of time.

The night flights are a new addition and run at about $100 more than the equivalent daytime flight, which covers the extra aircraft and instructor time that a night departure and a lit-runway return actually take. The multi-engine flight in the twin takes an extra passenger for $100 more.

How To Choose Between 60, 90 And 120 Minutes

The single most common mistake is buying 60 minutes and wishing you had bought 90. Here is the arithmetic behind that.

The clock is aircraft time, not door-to-door time. Budget roughly two hours at the airport for a 60-minute flight: a briefing of about twenty to thirty minutes at the table with a sectional chart and a model aircraft, the preflight walkaround with your instructor, taxi and run-up, the flight itself, then shutdown and a short debrief. Taxi at Van Nuys is genuinely part of the experience, but it is also five to ten minutes at each end, so a 60-minute booking gives you roughly forty to forty-five minutes of airborne time.

That is enough for one good loop. It is not enough for two. Forty-five airborne minutes gets you comfortably out to the Hollywood Sign, down over Griffith Park and back, or west over the Santa Monica Mountains to the coast and home. It does not get you both, and it does not get you as far west as Point Dume with time to linger.

Ninety minutes changes the flight from a loop into a route. You can run the city and the coast in the same flight, or you can take one of them slowly, orbit something twice, and still have twenty minutes to try climbs, descents and turns away from the scenery. For most people booking a one-off ride rather than a first lesson, ninety minutes is the right answer and the extra $70 is the best-spent money on this page.

One hundred and twenty minutes is a cross-country. It is what you need to reach Catalina Island and land there, or to fly the entire coastline from Malibu to Palos Verdes, or to go north over the Santa Susana Mountains toward Santa Clarita and back down the Valley. Two hours is also long enough that fatigue becomes real for a first-timer, so it suits people who already know they like small aircraft, or couples splitting the flying between them.

We publish the per-minute arithmetic on our discovery flight cost breakdown if you want to see how the tiers compare on a dollars-per-minute basis, and our sibling page on airplane tour prices in Los Angeles sets these numbers against the other ways of getting airborne here.

Choosing Your Route

Van Nuys sits in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, which turns out to be an unusually good place to start a scenic flight. The mountains are five minutes away in three directions, the ocean is twelve minutes west, the Hollywood Sign is six minutes east and downtown is fifteen. Nothing worth seeing in Los Angeles is far from the field. Here is what each route actually gives you.

The Hollywood Sign And Griffith Park Loop

East along the north face of the Santa Monica Mountains: Universal City and the backlot, Lake Hollywood and the Mulholland Dam, then the Hollywood Sign on Mount Lee seen from the north side, which is the angle almost nobody gets from the ground. Griffith Observatory follows on its shoulder of the hill, then the Hollywood Bowl and the Capitol Records building, and downtown fills the windscreen after that. This is the most requested route we fly and it works in a 60-minute booking. The full route, the order the landmarks appear in and the light at each time of day are on our Hollywood Sign flight page.

The Malibu And Santa Monica Bay Coast

West over the Santa Monica Mountains, across the ridge, and the Pacific appears all at once through a gap in the hills, which is the moment most passengers remember. Then a left turn down the coast: Malibu Pier, Zuma, Point Dume, the Getty Villa, Santa Monica Pier, the Venice canals. The water off Point Dume is clear enough in summer that you can see the kelp beds and, often enough to be worth mentioning, whales and dolphin pods. Our Malibu coast flight page covers the route and the existing Malibu Coast discovery flight for two in detail.

Downtown And The San Fernando Valley

The straightest line to a skyline. Out of Van Nuys to the south-east, over Burbank and Glendale, with Dodger Stadium, the Arts District and the downtown towers ahead. On a clear winter morning after rain you can see the San Gabriel Mountains with snow on them behind the skyline, and the whole basin out to Long Beach. Our discovery flight for two over downtown is built around this route.

Sunset And Night

The same routes, at the two times of day when Los Angeles looks best from the air. A sunset flight puts the sun into the Pacific in front of you and lights the whole Santa Monica Mountains ridge orange from the west; timing it means working back from the sunset time for that week, which we explain on the sunset flight page. A night flight is a completely different city: a grid of light from the Valley floor to the ocean, the runway lights at Van Nuys and Burbank, and a horizon that is entirely made of houses. That is covered on our night flight page, and the $329 single and $399 for-two night flights are new.

Catalina Island

A 120-minute booking is enough to fly out to Catalina, land on the plateau at 1,602 feet, and fly home. It is a genuine cross-country flight with an ocean crossing, an airport with a 3,000-foot runway on top of a mountain, and an approach that most licensed pilots remember for years. The detail, including what commercial travel to the island does and does not exist, is on our fly to Catalina Island page.

The Twin

The Piper Seminole is a four-seat, two-engine airplane with counter-rotating propellers, and flying a twin is a different sensation from flying a single: more noise, more power, more airplane. Our multi-engine discovery flight is $499 for two people, one flying and one riding, with an extra passenger for $100 more. The Seminole limit is 200 lb per passenger and 550 lb combined.

Which Airplane You Will Fly

Most discovery flights here are flown in the Piper Warrior PA-28-161, and there is a reason for that. It is a four-seat, low-wing airplane with a 160-horsepower Lycoming engine, which matters for sightseeing because a low wing does not sit between you and the ground. In a high-wing aircraft you look out at the horizon and down past a strut; in a Warrior you look straight down over the side at the Hollywood Sign. It is also stable enough that a person who has never touched a control yoke can hold a heading within a few minutes.

Those are retail pay-as-you-go rental rates for licensed pilots, listed here so you can see what the aircraft in your ride actually costs to operate. Course package rates are lower and are set out on the airplanes you will fly. The discovery flight prices further up this page already include the aircraft, the instructor and the fuel.

The Cirrus SR22 Turbo is the upgrade worth understanding. It has a 310-horsepower turbocharged engine, a full glass cockpit, leather seats, a side yoke rather than a control wheel, air conditioning and a whole-airframe parachute. It cruises at 215 knots, which in practice means you cover the coast from Malibu to Palos Verdes in the time a Warrior takes to reach Santa Monica. If the ride is a present for someone who flies airlines regularly and will not be impressed by a trainer, this is the one.

Weight, Age And Identification Requirements

These are the questions that decide whether a booking can happen, so they are worth answering before you pay.

Weight. The limits are set by the aircraft, not by us. A single-person discovery flight in the Warrior carries a 180 lb limit for the person flying. A flight for two carries a 360 lb combined limit across both passengers, so an imbalance between two people is fine as long as the total works. The Cirrus allows 400 lb combined. The full-motion simulator has no weight limit at all, which makes it a genuine alternative rather than a consolation prize. If you are close to a limit, call and tell us the real numbers rather than guessing, because an aircraft that is over gross weight does not fly and we will have to reschedule you on the day. Our page on weight limits for flight training goes through the loading arithmetic.

Age. There is no FAA minimum age to receive flight instruction or to handle the controls with an instructor beside you. The minimum ages in Part 61 apply to soloing and to certificates, not to lessons. In practice we want a passenger who can reach the rudder pedals and follow instructions, which usually means about ten years old. Under 18 needs a parent or guardian present to sign. We run a dedicated teen flight training program and take younger children for lessons as well.

Identification. Bring a government photo ID. You do not need a medical certificate, a student pilot certificate or any prior paperwork to take a discovery flight, because you are not acting as pilot in command. Those come later and only if you decide to train. Our requirements post covers health questions, medication and motion sickness.

Clothing. Closed shoes, sunglasses, layers. The cabin at 3,000 feet over the Valley in July is warm on the ground and cool airborne. Headsets are provided.

What Happens On The Day, Start To Finish

Arrive at 7900 Balboa Blvd about fifteen minutes before your booking. Park on site; there is no airport parking structure to navigate, because general aviation at Van Nuys works nothing like a terminal.

Your instructor takes you to a table first. You will look at a chart of the Los Angeles basin, talk about where you are going, and cover the four things the airplane does: pitch, roll, yaw and power. This is a real briefing, not a safety video, and it is the part that turns the flight into a lesson. Expect twenty to thirty minutes.

Then the walkaround. You will do it with the instructor, with a checklist, touching the aircraft: fuel sumps, oil, control surfaces, tires, pitot tube. People are often surprised at how physical and how unglamorous a preflight inspection is. It is also the single best thing for anyone nervous about small aircraft, because you see for yourself what is being checked. If nerves are the issue, our page on discovery flights for nervous flyers is written for exactly that.

In the aircraft: headsets on, seat and rudder pedals adjusted, doors latched, engine start, and the radio calls begin. Van Nuys is a Class D tower under the Los Angeles Class B shelf and it is one of the world's busiest general aviation airports, so there is traffic to listen to on the taxi out. Runways here are 16R/34L at 8,001 feet and 16L/34R at 4,000 feet, and light trainers normally use the shorter parallel.

Your instructor handles the takeoff. Somewhere in the first two minutes after the gear settles into the climb, they will say the words that surprise everyone: your airplane. From there you fly it. The instructor talks, points, corrects with a light touch on the yoke and takes control only when they need to. For the landing they will fly it, usually with your hands following theirs on the controls.

Afterwards: shutdown, a short debrief, and if you want one, a logbook entry. That entry is a real record of dual instruction received and it counts toward the 40 hours in 14 CFR 61.109 for a private pilot certificate. Enroll in a course within 24 hours of your flight and we credit the full cost of the discovery flight toward it.

Airplane Rides Versus Helicopter Tours

The comparison people actually want is against a helicopter tour, so here it is without the marketing.

A helicopter hovers and an airplane does not, so a helicopter can hold still next to a landmark and an airplane has to orbit it. For a photograph of one specific thing, that is a real advantage. For seeing a city, it is close to irrelevant, because an airplane covers far more ground per minute and burns far less money doing it.

Helicopter tours are usually sold per person with a minimum number of passengers, and durations are typically short. Airplane rides here are sold per aircraft for a block of time. That structural difference is the whole story on price: two people in a helicopter usually pay twice, and two people in our aircraft pay once. Because published helicopter rates change and vary by operator, compare like for like by taking the operator's current per-person price, multiplying by the number of people flying, and dividing by the airborne minutes you actually get. We do that arithmetic on our airplane tour prices page.

The other difference is the one that does not show up in a price table: nobody hands you the controls of a helicopter on a tour. On a discovery flight you fly, and the hour is logged. If you want to see a landmark, book a helicopter. If you want to fly an airplane over Los Angeles, book this.

How Low Can You Fly Over Los Angeles

Reasonably often we get asked whether we can fly directly over a specific house, or right next to the Hollywood Sign. The answer is set by 14 CFR 91.119, and it applies to us the same way it applies to everyone.

Over any congested area of a city, town or settlement, or over any open air assembly of people, the minimum is 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft. Over other than congested areas the minimum is 500 feet above the surface, and over open water or sparsely populated areas an aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle or structure. Underneath all of that sits 91.119(a): at any altitude, you must be able to make an emergency landing without undue hazard to people or property on the ground if the engine quits.

In practice our scenic flights run between roughly 2,500 and 4,500 feet, which is high enough to comply comfortably, low enough to recognize individual buildings, and where the air is usually smoothest. Van Nuys sits beneath the Los Angeles Class B airspace shelf, so a flight east toward the Hollywood Sign or west toward the coast stays below the Class B floor without needing a clearance. Your instructor works Van Nuys Tower on departure and SoCal Approach en route. If you want the full picture of how the airspace here fits together, our page on airspace classes explained is the place to start, and Van Nuys Airport covers the field itself.

Where People Fly From Across Los Angeles

Every flight on this page departs Van Nuys, because that is where our aircraft and instructors are. Van Nuys is central to more of Los Angeles than people expect: it is roughly twenty minutes from Studio City and Sherman Oaks, twenty-five from Burbank and Calabasas, thirty to thirty-five from Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Pasadena in normal traffic, and about forty-five from Santa Monica or Downtown. There is no queue, no security line and no terminal, so airport-to-airborne is about forty minutes including the briefing.

Santa Monica Airport, the field most Westside searchers think of first, closes on 31 December 2028 under its consent decree and its runway is already shortened to 3,500 feet, which is why an increasing share of flight activity on that side of town now starts at Van Nuys. Our discovery flight near me page has the drive times by neighborhood.

When To Book And What Cancels A Flight

We fly seven days a week from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM. The best air over Los Angeles is early: the first two or three hours after sunrise are usually smooth, clear and least busy on the radio, and in summer the marine layer has often burned off inland well before it clears at the coast. The second-best air is the last hour before sunset, which is also the best light.

Things that move a flight: low ceilings from the marine layer, which is a May and June phenomenon here more than a winter one; strong Santa Ana winds, which usually mean turbulence rather than danger but make for an unpleasant first flight; and rain, which is rare and short. We do not fly a first-timer in conditions that will put them off flying for life. If we move your booking, you keep your money, and our weather and cancellation policy sets out exactly how that works. On a weather day the full-motion simulator at $189 is a genuine substitute, because the Redbird MCX is an FAA-approved training device rather than a game.

Weekends fill first, and so does anything within two weeks of Father's Day, Christmas and Valentine's Day. If the flight is a gift for a fixed date, book three to four weeks ahead or buy a gift card and let the recipient pick a date, which is what we usually recommend.

Related Reading

• Discovery flights in Los Angeles — the full guide to how the flight works and what is included.
• Hollywood Sign flight — the most requested route, landmark by landmark.
• Malibu coast flight — Point Dume, Zuma and the Santa Monica Bay.
• Unique things to do in Los Angeles from the air — where a flight fits among the alternatives.
• Airplane tour prices in Los Angeles — every way to get airborne here, compared on price.
• Learn to fly in Los Angeles — what happens if the ride turns into a license.

Airplane Rides In Los Angeles FAQ

How Much Is An Airplane Ride In Los Angeles?

Our airplane rides start at $229 for 60 minutes in a Piper Warrior with one person flying. A flight for two people starts at $299, the Cirrus SR22 for two starts at $399, a night flight is $329, and the multi-engine flight in the Piper Seminole is $499 for two. There is no tax, fuel surcharge or booking fee on top.

Do You Actually Fly The Plane On A Discovery Flight?

Yes. You sit in the left seat and fly the aircraft for most of the flight with an instructor beside you who has a full second set of controls. The instructor handles the takeoff and normally the landing, and takes control any time they need to. The hour is logged as dual instruction received.

Are Airplane Rides Near Me Available Without Van Nuys Traffic?

All our flights depart Van Nuys Airport at 7900 Balboa Blvd. It is roughly twenty minutes from Studio City and Sherman Oaks, twenty-five from Burbank and Calabasas, and thirty-five from Hollywood or Beverly Hills. There is no terminal and no security line, so you go from the car park to the aircraft in about forty minutes including the briefing.

Is An Airplane Ride The Same As An Air Tour?

No. A commercial air tour is a passenger-carrying flight for compensation under 14 CFR 91.147, which requires a Letter of Authorization from the FAA and carries no instruction. We sell discovery flights, which are flight lessons: you fly, the instructor teaches, and the time is logged toward a pilot certificate.

What Is The Weight Limit For An Airplane Ride?

180 lb for a single-person discovery flight in the Piper Warrior, 360 lb combined for a flight for two, and 400 lb combined for the Cirrus SR22. The multi-engine discovery flight in the Piper Seminole is 200 lb per passenger and 550 lb combined. The full-motion simulator has no weight limit. These are aircraft loading limits, so tell us the real figures when you book rather than on the day.

How Long Is An Airplane Ride Over Los Angeles?

Bookings are 60, 90 or 120 minutes of aircraft time, plus about twenty to thirty minutes of briefing beforehand and a short debrief after. A 60-minute booking gives roughly forty to forty-five minutes airborne after taxi. Ninety minutes is the duration most people are happiest with, and 120 minutes is what you need to reach Catalina Island.

Can Two People Fly Together?

Yes. Our discovery flights for two put one person in the left seat flying and one in the back, with a 360 lb combined limit in the Piper Warrior and 400 lb in the Cirrus. On a 90 or 120-minute booking you can swap seats mid-flight so both people fly. The multi-engine flight in the Seminole takes a third passenger for $100 more, within 200 lb per passenger and 550 lb combined.

Does An Airplane Ride Count Toward A Pilot License?

Yes. A discovery flight is dual instruction received and is logged as such, counting toward the 40-hour minimum in 14 CFR 61.109 for a private pilot certificate. If you enroll in a course within 24 hours of your flight we credit the full cost of the flight toward the course.

Book Your Airplane Ride Over Los Angeles

The 60-minute discovery flight is $229 and is the right first booking for most people; the 90-minute flight at $299 is the one almost nobody regrets. If two of you are flying, start with the Malibu Coast flight for two or the downtown flight for two. If you are not sure which ride suits you, or you have a weight, age or nerves question you would rather ask a human, book a free consultation or call (818) 330-1318 any day between 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM. We are at 7900 Balboa Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91406, on Van Nuys Airport.