Prepaid Block Time for Flying Clubs: How It Works and How to Price It

What "block time" actually means

A block is a prepaid bucket of flight hours on a specific aircraft. A member pays for, say, 25 hours up front, and each flight draws down against that balance instead of generating a new charge. When the block runs low, they buy another one. The member gets a simpler bill and often a better rate; the club gets the cash today and a member who is now committed to flying with you.

The mechanics are simple but the details matter: what rate the hours are sold at, which meter they draw down against, when they expire, and what happens to unused hours. Get those four decisions right and block time runs itself.

Setting the block rate

The block rate is whatever you decide it is — there is no rule that it must be a discount. Many clubs sell block time at their normal wet or dry rate simply for the cash-flow and administrative benefit, and others offer a modest discount (commonly 5–15%) to reward the commitment and the up-front payment.

Think of any discount as the price of money today. A member handing you $1,750 for 25 hours is giving you working capital you would otherwise collect one flight at a time — and taking on the risk that they don't fly it all. A few dollars an hour off is a fair trade for both sides. Whatever you choose, set the block rate as an explicit, admin-entered number so it is never ambiguous what a block hour costs.

Tach or Hobbs: pick one per block

Block hours have to draw down against a meter, and clubs bill on different ones. Tach time (which runs slower at low RPM) tends to favor the pilot on the ground and during taxi; Hobbs time (which runs whenever the master is on) favors the club. Whichever your club bills on, the block should draw down on the same meter so the math stays consistent with the rest of your billing.

The cleanest approach is to let the club choose the meter when the block is issued, and then apply it automatically on every flight — so a 1.4-hour tach flight subtracts exactly 1.4 hours from the block, with no manual conversion.

Expiry, extensions, and unused hours

Most blocks carry an expiration date — commonly 90, 180, or 365 days — for two reasons: it keeps the liability on your books from growing forever, and it nudges members to actually fly. Set a start and end date when you issue the block.

Life gets in the way, though. Aircraft go down for maintenance, weather closes in for a month, a member has a medical issue. A good block policy lets an admin extend the expiry date for exactly those reasons, with a note explaining why. That flexibility is what keeps block time from feeling like a "use it or lose it" trap.

• Set an explicit start and expiry date on every block.
• Allow admins to extend the date for maintenance, weather, or hardship — with a reason on the record.
• Decide up front what happens to hours left over at expiry (see refunds, below).

Refund policy: decide before you sell

The single most common block-time dispute is "I didn't fly it all — can I get my money back?" Answer that question in writing before you sell the first block. There is no universally correct answer; there is only the answer your club has decided and communicated.

Many clubs make blocks non-refundable — the discount and the cash-flow benefit are premised on the sale being final — and simply forfeit unused hours at expiry (this is sometimes called "breakage"). Others allow refunds at the club's discretion. Either is defensible. What is not defensible is deciding case-by-case with no stated policy, which is how you end up with resentful members and inconsistent books.

Why a spreadsheet eventually fails

Block time is easy to start on a spreadsheet and painful to maintain there. Every flight has to be manually subtracted from the right member's balance at the right rate; overflow — a flight longer than the hours remaining — has to be split between block rate and normal rate by hand; expirations have to be watched and written off; and a member asking "how many hours do I have left?" means someone opens a file and does arithmetic. Every one of those steps is a place to make a quiet, compounding error.

The alternative is software that treats the block as a live balance: it draws down automatically at the block rate on every flight, splits overflow to the normal rate when a block runs out mid-flight, shows the member their remaining hours in real time, and forfeits or flags hours at expiry without anyone remembering to. That is exactly what FlightBoard's Block Time feature does — the club sets the rate, meter, dates, and refund policy once, and the drawdown, overflow, expiry, and member balance all happen on their own on an immutable, auditable ledger. It's a capability most club-management tools simply don't offer.