"How to Choose Between Two Different Flight Schools?"

Our next question comes from Brett. I've decided to start training for his private rotorcraft license, and he is having issues choosing between two local airports in Utah, Provo and Spanish Fork. How would he go about choosing the right one?

I would give them both a try. And, heck, if you're satisfied with both of them, you could do both. And here's the catch. Not even a catch. Flight school. Once they have you in the door, they want to keep you, right? And many times they're like, oh, you're gonna go fly over there. Like, they'll actually get kind of snarky with you because you're flying somewhere else. And I think that's a bunch of baloney because you learn from different instructors flying different aircraft, flying in different places. And yes, it can make your training maybe drag out a little bit longer because you're switching back and forth, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting some experience at one place and getting experience to the other. I would, hands down, go see how they treat you, get a feel for. How do you think their maintenance program is? Which may be hard if you're not a maintenance person, but you get a general feel. Are they well kept? Are they clean? Does it seem like the maintenance being taken care of? How do they treat you at the flight school? I would totally base it on how they treat you. So I would, hands down, you got two choices. I'd go try them out. Both. I would fly with one, then go fly with the other one, and then just pick the one that you think is best, and then maybe get five or 10 hours, start making some progress, and then maybe go fly at the other one just a little bit. And just remember, I. In my opinion, if they give you a hard time about that, then they're not a totally fair operator. Right? Like, they should understand that you learn from different people, different places, and every time you fly with a different instructor, you learn something new. And what people do is you start flying and you get comfortable with one instructor, so you just want to fly with that one instructor. And sometimes they'll even encourage you to fly with somebody else. And you go, oh, no, I just want to fly with you. So don't fall in that trap either. Right? Like, you'll. You'll find that you'll favor one instructor over another. However, you'll learn. Every person you fly with explains things just a little bit different, and you'll learn a lot from flying with different people. So I encourage different flight schools, different instructors. You know, for example, we had Cameron, we talked about Yesterday up there on the Hogs wall of fame had 160 hours. His flight school was having a hard time when he wanted to come back and steal his instrument. And he told me they were giving him a hard time and they were mad at him because he came to us for the checkride. And I said, that's bullshit because they couldn't get you finished. They should be happy. My examiner said, hell, that flight school should be sending all their people up here. They can still fly. You build their time, get their money. But since they can't satisfy the needs with the examiner and get people done in a proper fashion, hell, send them up to you. Let them finish, send them back. So he wanted to go back and do his instrument, but they gave him a hard time about it because they were mad. He came to me for him to finish and I told his mom because she was upset about the money. And I go, that's on them. And if they don't want to let you come back, then shame on them. They should say, yeah, come on back, let's do your instrument rating. Right? That's how I feel about that.

Well, he added into chat that the Bravo is tower controlled while Spanish Fork is not. What do you recommend?

Okay, that's a great question. I think you need both. And that, that would be another good reason to fly it both. For example, here we're class G, so there's no tower. It makes it really, really nice for us to go out here, do what we got to do, hone somebody, finish them, get them ready for a check ride. And then we have local airports we can go to if they need some tower experience. But if all you do is train with no tower, then you'll be intimidated when you have to go fly through controlled airspace. So that would be a great reason to fly a little bit in both places because you could get the uncontrolled environment a lot of times is just you can make a little bit better progress because you're not dealing with the tower. On the flip side of that, you need the tower experience to become a rounded pilot and understand how to do it and fly in and out of it and talk to the tower. So I would recommend both, absolutely, hands down. 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