How to Find the Best Flight School

Nick from Part Time Pilot. Sorry I haven’t been making videos lately I’ve actually been working on an FAA written test prep course, online course for you to study for the test prep, take practice tests watch some really good videos and learn a lot to prepare you for the FAA written test. You can even get an endorsement once I launched that which is coming soon so stay tuned. Alright guys anyways enough of that. Let’s get to today’s video how to choose a flight school.

Alright so this is part of my video series on everything you need to know on how to get started, what requirements you need, what are your ground training options, what are your flight training options, how much is getting your license cost, and now how to choose a flight school. So I’m going to go over an example of how I would choose a flight school after I kind of describe what are the important factors in choosing a flight school. So I think this is a very important video for those of you just starting out and looking to learn to fly somewhere. So let’s get to it. Okay so choosing the right flight school and consistent training are two of the most important certain factors in maintaining a low Flight Training budget so that’s the right flight school and consistently training. Therefore, it’s very important you do your research when it comes to the flight school. It’s a very important step, first you got to decide whether you want to do part 141 or part 61. If you don’t know the difference between those two you’re gonna have to watch my video which is popping up a little icon in the top right of the screen right now on what those differences are they’re subtle but check out that video and once you’ve decided that it’ll narrow your flight school search down a little bit.

So next, once you’ve decided that, follow the following steps to make an informed decision. All right let’s see. So go on Google find three to five  flight schools whether you decided part 141 or 61 near your location and write them down. Now give each school that you just wrote down a call and get the following information from those schools and write them down next to the name. Okay you want to get a quote for a private pilot’s license from each of those schools and their hourly aircraft rental rate. So say “Hey! you know I’m wondering I want to get my private Pilots license. How much does it cost to rent an aircraft for an hour for students and then how much do you guys quote students go through the complete training to get a private pilot’s license. Then you want the number, ask them the number of students at the school at any one point in time. Say “how many students do you currently have your school right now”. Write this number down it’s very important. Next is the number of aircraft that the school has, how many instructors they have, each instructor’s rate so their hourly rate or training and how long each instructor has been teaching there and then finally whether or not they have maintenance on call. I will explain why these are important in the example coming up. Next up, use Google Maps to determine the commute time to each flight school. This is very important like I said above. If you want to have maintain a low Flight Training budget and save yourself some money you catch is Right Flight School and consistent training part of that consistent training is being able to get to your flight school when you can whether other factors really affect whether you can fly or not. You don’t want to get stuck in traffic or not be able to get to a plane. It really helps if the airport is close to you, it just really it really helps. So four then, you want to use all this information to calculate your own quote for each School. The quote that they give you is most often going to be unrealistic okay they’re going to give you based off the minimum hour requirements and if you want to know what those minimum hour requirements are, you can watch my video on that.There’s a little i popping up in the top right corner of your screen. So check that out. These schools are going to quote you based off these minimum hours that is very it’s very rare that especially if you have job or other responsibilities. For Pilots to get their license in the minimum amount of hours so that’s kind of unrealistic and they’re gonna quote you that because they want it to seem cheap so you sign up. All right, so it’s important to calculate your own quote and I will explain how to do this in my next YouTube video. Alright, so, stay tuned for that. But for now, let’s just keep going down this list. Once you’ve done all that, choose as close to an ideal school as there is and the ideal School would be one that has the following: they’re honest with their quote so how closely your the quote you calculated is to the quote they gave you. You know they’re not saying “Oh it’ll only cost you $8000 but you know that okay well based off how often I can fly it’s probably going to be more expensive than that and they want to be on it, you want them to be honest with you on that, the quote is Affordable for you. All right, if they quote you $15000 and you can’t do that then you might have to think about okay maybe you want to find a school that’s being authentic and also has lower rates and then low student aircraft ratio this is very important so the number of students divided by the number of aircraft this is super important on maintaining consistent training like I said up here. Consistent training if weather or something cancels your flight you’re gonna have to rebook your flight. So you’re gonna have to get on the schedule for that aircraft if there are a lot of students at a flight school per aircraft. Let’s say there’s 100 students and only five aircrafts that’s 20 students per aircraft the likelihood of that that aircraft is already booked up for the next couple weeks is very high. Okay so now instead of just missing one day you’ve now missed two weeks of training because you can’t book another aircraft. This is a big deal. This happened to me a lot and I didn’t realize it so you wanna it helps that you can be able to quickly rebook an airplane because a lot of stuff happens. That downs your flight and it’s good to be flexible. Okay next instructors who have been there been around for a bit this is very important because you don’t want your instructor to leave while you’re training you don’t you know it’s not the worst thing in the world but you’re gonna have to get accustomed to a new instructor how their teaching style, what they want out of you. This takes a lesson or two to get acclimated and this happened to me three times during my training. So it’s best to stick with the same instructor get one you like and stick with them. It helps a lot and then finally maintenance on call. I mentioned that before. They have maintenance on call and sometimes, the plane they can turn that plane around and have it flying pretty quickly and it won’t ground the plane for day or days or weeks.

All right, so that’s the basics of how to choose a flight school. Now let’s go through an example so in this example we’re going to have school A on our left and then I’ll show you School B in one second. So School A is 15 miles from your house. They gave you a code for ten thousand five hundred dollars based on the amount of hours you expect to fly each week and they said the aircraft’s instructor rental rates are 150 an hour for aircraft and fifty dollars an hour for our instructor the school has an average of 50 students at any time and have five aircraft that you can rent so the student aircraft ratio is 10 50 divided by five the school has maintenance on staff which is good and the school has five instructors and three have been instructing there for over five years. All right, so now let’s look at school B it’s five miles from your house. So it’s closer to your house. That’s good, give you a quote for 7 500, very cheap, very appealing. Based on minimum hour requirements and aircraft instructor rental rates of 125 and 40 an hour. So a lot cheaper than School A. The school has an average of 80 students at any time and five aircraft. So that’s about what a 16 or so student to aircraft ratio. Okay school does not have maintenance on staff and then school has five instructors and none of them have been there for over three years. So what’s the verdict? Which school would you choose? Well, I’ll tell you what I would do. You know at first glance you might think school B, “oh wow 7 500 and I have my private pilot’s license”. That’s hard to be right there, but let’s take a deeper look although School B is 10 hours closer, it’s cheaper and has lower rates and also you know they based their quote to you based off the minimum hour requirements and again, if you have other responsibilities like a full-time job kids family whatever, you’re probably not going to be able to fly enough two to three times a week consistently to be able to get your private pilot’s license in the minimum hours so more likely it’s going to take longer than the minimum hour requirement and therefore that’s not really realistic quote like School A who took into account how often you’re gonna fly and gave you an honest quote on that. School B also has a higher student to aircraft ratio they have 16 students per aircraft while School a has 10 students aircraft that means at school a you’ll be able to easily schedule more easily schedule a flight. If your flight is canceled while School B it might be hard to schedule a flight because there’s so many students competing for that spot and this will lead to miss flying days which will have you avoid not allow you to have consistent training and will increase your costs. And then School B only has new instructors which likely means the instructors use this school as a stepping stone to be a commercial pilot and they may leave halfway through your training. This isn’t a bad thing I mean a lot of you know people do this. They become an instructor to build up hours to be a commercial pilot. It’s a great thing to do but if there is an option for you to go to a school where there’s a instructor that’s been around for a long time has a lot of experience and you know what will be there throughout your entire training, that is very beneficial. So after all this, my decision is school A although it has the higher rates. I think you know I got a good vibe from them they were more honest on their quote, have less students so I’ll be able to book aircraft more easily. They have maintenance on staff. So if something happens to the aircraft they can turn around that aircraft quickly and then it’s more likely that I get an instructor that is well experienced and likes what they do they’ve been doing it for over five years and they’re gonna stick with me through my entire training. So I would choose School A and honestly, my honest opinion is that school A will end up being cheaper for you than School B. School B, although they say they’re cheaper and they gave you a smaller quote, you’re going to have a lot of inconsistencies in your training at that school and it’s just going to rack up your costs. So you want to look for a school more like School A.

All right guys if you have any questions please comment below. Thanks for watching, and again stay tuned for my FAA written test prep course online course coming soon. Really excited about it. If you haven’t subscribed, please do and then as always follow me on Instagram at part.time.pilot. Thanks for watching and have a good one.