If you want to become a professional pilot, how successful you are in reaching this goal will depend primarily on your determination and secondly on the pilot training that you get at a local flight school or a flight training academy.

Like so many other schools, there are great schools, good schools, and schools that should have gone out of business a long time ago. Unfortunately, you won’t find an evaluation on their web site, in their yellow page ads, or in the brochures that they send you. It is up to you to learn to thoroughly evaluate the school before you put your money down for flight training to become a pilot.

Where Do You Find Flight Schools?

The first part of deciding where you want to do your flight training is to find the flight school that suits you. It might surprise you how many flight schools there are in your area. The yellow pages is a good place to start your search. Look under “flight training” or “aviation” as a starting point.

There is also the Internet. Just type in the words, “flight training” or “airplane training” in your favorite search engine and see the results. You will discover several websites that are dedicated to helping you find any type of flight school you are looking for. Start with looking in your local area and then expand it to areas that you think you may be willing to go to get flight training. Finally, there are several aviation forums that you can post questions to and view the responses. WillFlyForFood.com is a great forum to join and submit questions, but be careful…you will have to weed out the replies that don’t offer anything useful and look for the information that you need.

Two Qualifications That Must Be Meet

There are two clear cut qualifications that will tell if one school is better than another:

1. The flight instructors depth and knowledge of the airline industry and the technical field of study of aeronautics
2. The flight instructors ability to teach and their commitment to your success.

A flight school may have wonderful pilots with hundreds of hours of flight time but if they don’t know how to teach, they won’t be much good to you. Similarly, the flight school may have wonderful teachers who can take you from beginner (Private Pilot) to expert (Airline Transport Pilot) in the curriculum but if they don’t have any more than a surface knowledge of what it means to be a professional pilot, their credibility is questionable. Look for schools that have flight instructors that have flown either for charter companies or for the airlines and that aren’t just trying to build hours. These are the flight instructors that enjoy teaching and can guide you on your path to becoming a professional pilot.

More Things To Consider

Furthermore, the flight school itself should be well equipped with the equipment necessary to give you the education to be a pilot and empowers the flight instructors with the material they need to teach you. Don’t be shy to inspect the classrooms, the books and the other equipment that will be needed in ground school to get you ready for the written pilot’s license exams and your flight lessons. There should be several different types of aviation books, computers loaded with training aides, and a library of videos from companies like Jeppensen and Gleim at your disposal.

Also, ask about the airplanes the school has for your flight training. Consider whether they are high-wing (Cessna) or low-wing (Piper Cherokee or Cirrus) airplanes. Some people like high-wing airplanes and some prefer low-wing airplanes. They basically fly the same but in many cases it is a personal choice. Does the school offer complex, high-performance, and multi-engine airplane training?

Are the airplanes equipped to offer both VOR and GPS training? Do they offer Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) training? If you can learn on a variety of different kinds of airplanes, the greater your depth of knowledge will be. Ask how old the airplanes are and how many of each kind of airplane do they have? This is important because sadly older airplanes break more and don’t have the latest avionics. The more airplanes, the more likely you are going to get an airplane when you want it. You want to know that the airplanes are in good repair and that the school always has airplanes available for your training even if some are in the hangers for inspection or repair.

What About Your Flight Instructor?

You should have a list of what you expect of a flight instructor and specifically of the flight instructor who will be your primary mentor for this process. That person should have a good resume of accomplishments both flying for a living and working in the airline industry. You want a seasoned pro to be sitting next to you when you take the controls of an airplane and you also want an instructor who has the heart of a teacher. Be very cautious of the flight instructor that just got their flight instructor rating and you are their first student. I would say pass on that flight instructor. Your flight instructor should love sharing information about flying and should enjoy taking a “civilian” and turning them into an accomplished pilot. You also want an instructor who is confident and willing to let you make mistakes, then help you learn from those mistakes.

Ask Lots of Questions

My daughter is four years old and I always tell her to ask lots of questions. The more questions she asks the faster she is going to learn. If she waits for me to tell her things, she may be waiting a long time. The same goes with you. You have the right to ask a lot of questions. During your training, if you don’t understand, ask your flight instructor. The instructor wants you to learn but if you don’t understand something they may not know that you don’t understand.

So ask. You should also ask for details about the flight training costs which will include supplemental costs like books, training materials, briefing fees, flight time fees, and flight instructor fees. You should ask questions about everything that was mentioned above. You should ask about airplane and instructor availability. You should ask questions about scheduling training flights and cancellations. If you have a questions…ask!

By the time your evaluation is done, you should have a firm idea what the school has to offer, what the flight instructors are like and what their experience level is, and a solid base of knowledge to use to compare flight schools. From there you can make the right choice who will be teaching you to take to the air and fulfill your lifelong dream of becoming a pilot.