How to Pick a Flight School | Flying Lessons

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Hi, my name is Josh Kallenberg and I'm here at the Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles, California. I've been flying professionally for about 13 years, and now I have the pleasure of flying this Gulfstream G450 which is a lot of fun and exciting. And today I'm going to talk to you about becoming a pilot. So how do you choose a flight school? Well, there are several ways you can go about doing this. You can look online. If they actually still have phone books, you can look in there. You can maybe talk to someone you know that is a pilot. That's one thing pilots like to do, is they love to talk about flying. There's a kind of running joke; how do you know there's a pilot in the room? Don't worry. He or she will tell you. One thing you need to consider is where you live geographically. How is the weather where you live? That plays a big part especially when you're doing your primary training. One of the better places to learn is Southern California, or Arizona. Places where you're generally going to get good weather. One thing you want to do in part of your research is actually go to the school, and visit several schools if you can just like visiting a college. You're going to go ahead and talk to the students. Talk to the instructors. You want to kind of get a feel for it. Look at the conditions of the facility. Look at the aircraft. It's kind of like looking at a car. You're going to kind of have an idea if they're in good shape or bad shape. One thing you're going to do when you pick a flight school is take an intro flight, which I strongly suggest, and what they're going to do is they're probably going to pair you up with a flight instructor, and that will be your first taste of what flying is going to be like. You will most likely fly the airplane for the majority of the flight, which is a lot of fun. You also want to bring your log book, because if you want to continue you can actually log that flight for instruction. Don't feel bad. If you don't like your instructor, if you don't feel comfortable, you can always ask to switch. It's not going to hurt their feelings. It would hurt my feelings, but it won't hurt their feelings if you did that and it's really important that you feel comfortable and trust your instructor when you're going through your training.