My view of Falcon Flight

[Tim]

Just wanted to post a few thoughts on my visit to Falcon. First I am very skeptical of any flight school that promises a bunch of stuff and wants a ton of money. I learned the hard way in dealing with ATA.

The office is still in the old building so very simple and nice. I met with the director of training Mike. I explained to him what I was looking for since I already had some of my license and rating and how many hours I had. He said that it would not be a problem to do a finish up for my commercial and then multi add-on. We then took a tour of the flight line and he explained the differences in the Diamonds and the 182RG is still used for complex and high performance. They are in line to get the Diamond twin-star. They are using a Seminole for the multi due to high mx cost of the seneca. I asked about the charter route they list on the website and he gave the details of how it works. The do strongly encourage you to get your CFI in order to build the neccessary time to meet 135 regs to fly left seat for the charter ops. At no time did I feel pressured to make a commitment or did I feel that he was being pushy. I was told that they will let you pay for block time and offer a discount if you do ( 6%, basically covers tax) but its not required. They also do not want the student to pay for the entire amount up front either. They do use Sallie Mae and Pilot Finance but only take draws as needed from my understanding. I can tell you if they had said they wanted it up front I would have been out of there in heartbeat. I did ask how the charter was doing and the bookings have been steady and self supportive.
Overall I would say it was a good visit and impressive. Not a very fancy and shiney new building but nice and clean. The airport itself is not overly busy so not much time should be spent waiting to take off. Plenty of approaches of various kinds within just a few minutes flight.

Anyway just my 2 cents worth on the visit.