My flying ebbs and flows with life, seasons, weather, etc...since I'll often go a few months without flying, I found OA checkouts were a great way of knocking t

My flying ebbs and flows with life, seasons, weather, etc...since I'll often go a few months without flying, I found OA checkouts were a great way of knocking the rust off. I would study up on the knowledge, and then the ~1 hour of flight time with an instructor for the annual OA checkout was enough for me to get comfortable again. (I never felt like I needed to spend flight time preparing for the OA checkouts.) And the OA checkout could also count as a flight review. So I guess the bottom line is that for me, I could always roll an OA checkout into time when I'd want to be flying with an instructor anyway. I never got charged more for OA than the published rental rates...but all the places where I did my checkouts had me fill out one extra sheet of paper so that an OA checkout also counted as a checkout for their own insurance rules. So if I was flying with a place a lot, I'd just do the checkout there and buy block time from them and rent under their non-OA policy. Basically, OA was great for everywhere other than one's local FBO, for which it was still typically a better deal to just rent under the terms of their standard non-OA policy. Renter's insurance would be a tough sell for a lot of people; my local FBO already required it so I was good to go. (My local FBO is great, but they're also the only place I know that does dry rentals where you're not insured by their policy...weird, I know)