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Originally Posted by Captain A This CAPT program is a total rip off....so again DON'T DO IT! |
Hi Captain A, your post was great! I only wish I met someone like you before I sank my battleship (with all my money) into CAPT. Now that I went through 6.5 pages of this thread, I can finally breathe and answer a question or two. Several people mentioned that they don't know what these kids are thinking signing up for these fast track programs. I can tell you what I was thinking.
I got my PVT back in 12/03 and loved my training. This flying thing was way cool, especially since I've always been fascinated by it since I was 3. After I got my PVT, I was flying cross countries every weekend and thought wouldn't it be great to get paid to do this instead of me shelling out money on an hourly basis? So began the search for the aviation career path.
I got caught up with the excitement of flying and when CAPT told me that it was doable for me to become a pilot, I started the paperwork. I did some research and spoke to my CFI about it and he basically told me not to turn love into a career. I should have listened to him. I was especially concerned with the 550 hours of "flight experience" that CAPT stated on their website at the time. At the time, I thought, this is Embry-Riddle. They're world reknowned for flight training. They must know what they're doing. And because I was 32 at the time, I thought time was against me with a commercial airline career. The prospect of not having to go through the CFI path was very attractive. I also got sold on the fact that they had these new DA40s with GPS and TCAS on them. They also mentioned they're upgrading them to full glass panels. And they were getting the DA42s very shortly. With all this great equipment, and that full motion simulator, I figured, they must know what they're doing with all this equipment. (Incidentally, DA40s were never upgrades, the DA42 were never on the flight line.)
To make a long story short, the program was supposed to be 10-12 months. I graduated in 18. They took their sweet a$$ time (5+ weeks) to even get my class' resumes together after graduation. Skipped out on our interview prep class, and managed to get people who graduated after us hired. To-date, only 1 of 6 people in my class has been hired, and only because he didn't want to wait for ASA anymore and the prospect of going to Pinnacle was not an attractive one (and I don't blame him for that whatsoever).
Bottom line, hind sight being 20/20, Captain A is right on. Never entertain these programs. I can't speak to the other programs out there, but they are only interested in making money. They got mine. Don't let them get yours.
The problem? How do you communicate these real world experiences to those people who didn't know any better, have no Internet access or don't know about the existence of these message boards (I didn't when I did my research)? So as long as there are these programs out there, there will always be someone going to it. It's absolutely imperative that people who know CFIs to educate them on this real world problem so that they can educate their students.