Budget Flight Simulator

This is a topic I don’t come across about very much through general blogs. In addition, there is very little reliable independent information out there that one can review to properly determine the best flight school environment for his personal training. Moreover, school visits are recommended, but more often than not, the environment presented is often hyped. The person at the front door is trying his/her best to present a climate consistent with the glossy images on the brochures and the websites.

I have accumulated 80 hours of flight time. I went through 3 flight schools before I found my fit. I started in a Part 141 training program with the first school. I finished in a Part 61 school. I was able to find the right instructor – and a personally satisfactory flight school curriculum (apart from the mandated FAA certified program) to complete my Private Pilot’s program. I was informed by my SEVENTH and final flight instructor (he had also been an FAA pilot examiner earlier in his career) that many people discontinue their training because of the aggravation associated with student/ instructor incompatibility, poor student/ instructor scheduling; the stick and carrot approach adopted by many US flight schools in their flight training programs, and questionable lessons pricing practices. Interestingly, an administrator at a school I had visited told me that he knew of an individual with a PhD. who had accumulated over 250 hours of flight time before she was proficient enough to qualify for her PRIVATE PILOT license! He reasoned that she was over analytical in everything that she did. This led to difficulties on her part in grasping the peculiarities of flight dynamics, and understanding the “building blocks” within the various stages of training.

I would beg to differ in my personal analysis – it appears to me that people with her personality type are the most vulnerable individuals to the pervasively deceptive training practices that can be observed at many flight training schools. This individual, unfortunately, became a natural gold mint for her instructors and the schools, even as she was striving (through sheer self determination) to balance personal training safety issues with the proficient skills necessary  to be a competent pilot.

I had another friend whose personality type was a bit different. He had been working part time on his private pilots license for well over 20 years. He had had to frequently curtail his training to address personal family issues. There were also bouts of underemployment. I met him at the second flight school I had attended.

Through personal experience, he had become hip to the schemes and tactics used by some schools to prolong the training programs of student pilots in order to allow the young instructors to accumulate more flight time themselves (many of them aspire to become airline pilots – in the shortest time possible); and to enable the school to “safeguard” their profit margins over the short term. He spotted this practice at the school and called the owners out on it. As a result, he was ostracized by the school’s administrators and labeled a difficult student. Consequently, no instructors wanted to fly with him (there were always scheduling conflict). He left the school after 3 weeks. He had invested about $1,000 by then. I might also add that I met another individual at this school who had spent $30,000 on his private pilot’s license alone! He obtained his commercial pilots license about 2 years later… only God knows what he had spent in total!

I will expand on my experiences in later blogs, and offer some suggestions…

I am an avid simmer by heart. I enjoy taking time after a long day at work to put in a few flight hours as a relaxing activity. I work at a financial institution where every hour has to be accounted for! In addition, I don’t get to travel as much as I would like to because of my job position set up, but the opportunities for vicarious travel abound with Microsoft Flight Simulator. The experience becomes greatly enhanced when the perfect add-on sceneries are included. I think I know my way around the Seattle-Tacoma Intl., and Portland International airports pretty well now – even though I have never flown into any of them in real life.  I am now familiar with the South Florida coast line and the Islands of The Bahamas. This makes my real flight trips between South Florida and the Caribbean that much more exciting as I can pinpoint exactly where I am at any given time. Of course if the cloud cover makes a VFR flight difficult, the default Garmin GPS always comes in handy!