Five Reasons to Choose an Accelerated Flight School

By Matthew Everett

One of the more challenging aspects of learning to fly is choosing how to do it. There are so many flight schools, accelerated programs, and individual instructors that it is often hard to decide what fits you, your schedule, and your learning style best. Not to mention the FAA doesn't care how you get to the check-ride as long as you meet the requirements laid out in their test standards. This leads to hundreds of variations on the theme of learning to fly. So how do you decide? The best way is to consider the perks of various flight instruction methods. Accelerated flight schools offer five major perks: you will learn to fly quicker and cheaper while using cutting-edge equipment, check-rides are often less daunting, and you can establish a career network.

Learn to Fly Faster at an Accelerated Flight School

Time and money fuel flight training. The amount of time you have to devote to training sets the pace that you can take with training. If you can only fly once a month, you are looking at quite a long time to build up flight time. Conversely, if you can devote several months to flight training exclusively, you can build flight time quickly and you will find that you progress through several ratings in a relatively short amount of time.

Learn to Fly Cheaper at an Accelerated Flight School

Considering the same examples as above, only flying once a month is less costly in the short term as it allows you to save up between flights, but it will cost you in the long run. Devoting a lot time in the short term to flying will yield greater savings because you will have less time to forget what you've learned. Flying more often is simply more efficient where learning is concerned and when you learn more efficiently, you will need to fly less which is money in your pocket.

Accelerated Flight Schools Use Cutting Edge Equipment

One of the easiest ways for flight schools to procure and maintain cutting-edge aircraft and other equipment is to take on many students. This spreads out the costs, which can stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, over many students. This is a great thing for you as a student of an accelerated program, because it means you can fly the latest and greatest training aircraft. Additionally, accelerated flight schools are often the early adopters of the most innovative new instruction systems such as full motion simulators or scenario-based training. These mechanisms and equipment help the schools cut costs and the students save time and money without sacrificing quality.

Less Daunting Check-Rides

A check-ride is a check-ride, right? Strictly speaking that is correct, but what if you were familiar with your examiner. What if you'd flown with the examiner before your check-ride? That would make the check-ride at least slightly less stressful. A little known secret of many accelerated programs is that they have an examiner on site. The familiarity this breeds really takes the stress out of the check-ride, because you've met the person giving your check-ride before the day of your check-ride. Incidentally, it also allows your instructors and other students to pass on knowledge of the examiner's individual quirks.

Establish a Career Network

Accelerated programs are designed to instruct multiple students at one time. This enables you to meet and interact with a large number of other students. Additionally, you will likely fly with multiple instructors and interact with numerous other flight school employees. All of these opportunities add up to create a rather large network of contacts for the all important job search. As the saying goes, it's not what you know, but who you know. When everybody is a qualified as you are for the job, knowing someone on the inside, even through an acquaintance, allows you a leg up on the competition.

Matthew Everett is a frequent contributor to AviationSchoolsOnline.com, a private pilot, and aviation blogger. You can find his blog at http://leavingterrafirma.com.