You will fly a few hours a week. The rest of it is ground school, chair-flying a procedure until it stops being frightening, and the people doing the same thing in the next seat. That part is not scheduled, and it decides more than the flying does.
On the first day of every new flight school and A&P class, at every campus, everything stops. It is part welcome for the people starting and part pinning ceremony for the people who have passed a checkride since the last one.
The pinning is the point. Certificates arrive as a piece of paper in the post weeks later, which is a strange way to mark the hardest thing you have done all year. This way the room you have been struggling in front of watches you get it.
Around it there are cookouts, game nights and aviation competitions of varying seriousness. None of it is compulsory and most people come anyway.
Not the instructors. The people three months ahead of you.
Nobody organizes them. Somebody books a room to grind through the instrument written, two other people turn up, and by the following month it is a standing thing. The written exams are where this matters most — they are a solitary slog and almost nobody does them well alone.
The person who passed their commercial checkride last month remembers exactly which manoeuvre nearly ended it. That is more useful to you than anything a brochure can say, and it is free, and it is sitting in the next room.
Most of the instructors here are Thrust graduates building hours in the same aircraft you are flying. They are not reading the phase you are stuck on off a syllabus. They were stuck on it.
There is no dormitory, no meal plan and no campus in the university sense. Thrust is an aviation training company on an airport, not a college with a quad.
Most students move to do this, and housing, food and travel are the largest costs the program fee does not cover. They are worth more planning than the tuition, which is fixed and published. If you can live at home and train at the nearest campus, that does more to lower your total than any other decision you will make — the program, the fleet and the Part 141 certificate are identical at all six.
Compare the six campuses→
Worth a look.
