PSI Fee Change Goes Into Effect on January 1

Starting January 1, flight schools and FBOs that administer the online aviation knowledge tests will see their cut of the $175 fee drop from $65 to $22 per test. That’s roughly a 70 percent drop in revenue for the businesses in question.

At the present time PSI Services LLC, owned by Lifelong Learner Holdings (LLH), is under contract with the FAA to provide the tests. In years past, there were two other companies, CATS and LaserGrade, but they have gone out of business, giving PSI the monopoly.

On November 18 PSI contacted the flight schools and FBOs to advise them of the fee change. The flight schools and FBOs are third-party providers that offer tests to their customers as a convenience and have no say in the cost of the tests. FBOs and schools contacted by FLYING said the $22 will not cover their costs of administering the tests, therefore they will likely cease to proctor them.

READ MORE: Flight Schools Consider Dropping Knowledge Tests

“This will really damage the fabric of general aviation flight training,” says David St. George, executive director of the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE). St. George has been a flight instructor and designated pilot examiner for decades and was one of the first aviation stakeholders to express concern about the impact the change in fee structure will have on the third-party vendors. He describes them as the small mom-and-pop FBOs that provide aviation testing as both a convenience to their customers and as a means to bolster the income during inclement weather when there isn’t a lot of flying.

“There are some 800 of these small testing facilities in the United States, some of them in very out of the way places,” he told FLYING. “They rely on that income from the tests.”

St. George noted that there has also been an increase in knowledge test taking over the past three years or so because of the number of persons desiring to be commercial drone pilots. “If you look at the FAA database on pilot certificates, you will see about half of them are drone pilots now.”

St. George sent a letter to the FAA’s Airman Testing Standards Branch, AFS-630, expressing his…