Accelerated Flight Training VS Traditional Flight Training
If you are currently undergoing flight training or are considering learning to fly in the future, this page will help you to decide if our Accelerated training program is right for you or if traditional training is more your style. It is important to note that there are many so called "accelerated" programs out there that can take 30 days to two months so beware of these. Our program typically takes about 10 to 15 days+/- to complete and have your private pilots license or instrument rating in hand (but not guaranteed). Lets start with what metrics we will be using to define the differences between the two types of training such as total time to completion, total flight time until completion, course completion rate, quality and experience level of your instructor, cost and break them down one by one.
Lets start with time until completion. With traditional flight training, your average flight time per lesson is about 1 to 1.2 hours. The average amount of flight hours to reach the proficiency required to receive the Private Pilots License in this format is about 65-75 hours of total flight time. In addition to this, on average every student will need 20-30 hours of ground training and is normally done in two hour increments as well. This comes down to 65 to 97 round trips to the airport! The average student will do about 3 two hour lessons per week which comes out to about 22 -32 weeks until completion. thats 5.5 to 8 months if you don't miss a lesson or your instructor doesnt leave to an airline in the middle of your training amongst many other distractions that may pop up along the way.
With our program and methods, our average time until completion is 10-15 days. We combine our ground and flight training to run concurrently throughout the day so that one day of training with us is equivalent to about a month of training at a traditional school. We normally fly anywhere from 3.5 to 5.5 hours a day with the average being about 4. Our average flight time until completion is 45-50 hours.
The total flight time needed to complete the Private Pilots License or Instrument rating varies from traditional to accelerated for a number of reasons. The first reason is the inefficiency and waste involved with the traditional training opposed to accelerated. To break down a typical traditional training session we will look at what the times alloted to certain tasks during a typical 1.1 hour flight: It will take .3 hours for taxi and runup, .2 hours to get to your practice area (the schools love having you do stalls for an unnecessary period of time), .4 hours of stalls, steep turns and remembering everything you forgot from your last fllight and .2 to get back to the airport and taxi back to parking. In the majority of traditional training, students are not encouraged to practice their radio procedures, pattern work and other tasks essential to actually piloting an airplane. The student rarely sees the light at the end of the tunnel and this is why 80-95% wont make it through to get the Private Pilots License in the end.
We are able to make our training effective and efficient due to the fact that we have engineered our program to cut out most of the waste that you would encounter with the traditional methods. You will be talking on the radio, landing the plane, entering the traffic pattern and using your avionics on the first day amongst other various tasks. The fact that our students can see the light at the end of the tunnel means that a much higher proportion of our students will make it to the end and receive their Private Pilots License or Instrument Rating (roughly 90%).
The greatest key to our sucess is by far our instructors! While most all flight schools employ low time instructors (about 500 -700 hours average) who are just looking to build their time to get to the airlines asap, our instructors are have years of real world experience in many different facets of aviation with thousands of flight hours logged. We love what we do and we arent going going anywhere anytime soon. We look forward to flying with you!