The single worst so-called Flight School I have had dealings with. The schools Director and many of his Flight Instructors, prey on students in a number of ways.
First they impress you with friendliness and professionalism on initial contacts. The schools director comes from corporate America, where he was involved in sales and is only a private pilot, he is however a minority owner in the school and perspective students aka "victims" should use due caution while listening to the speech in his downstairs office.
His Speech includes his open door policy, his willingness to work with you, and the glory of making $400,000 a year at United Airlines, or perhaps flying a LearJet for executives on ski-trips or the high altitude chamber that students rent time in down by Williams.
This speech has many variables, but usually include a tour of the school, the hanger where Jet Aircraft rent space, sometimes he will open the door to small aircraft used by westwind and let you sit inside while asking you questions like "do you think you would enjoy flying around exotic places, getting paid to do something so exciting and fun, making great money and only having to work a few days a month? This is just one of many Traps he is setting.
Flight Instructors don't return phone calls, sometimes they don't even show up to flights previously planed.
Flight Instructors are paid around $15 per hour from what I have been told and only when instructing a student on the ground or in the air. They can easley work 12 hours or more per day and only get paid for the actual instruction time, so in-between time, which can be a lot, is unpaid time. This almost Forces the instructor to "Milk" the student when he does get time.
Milking the student happens two ways. First, they have extending the training, made delays or had a student repeat lesions. The second way they MILK the student is cleverer. They are allowed by the FAA, to log all hours of flight time, and because the amount of flight time you have is important to getting a job they basically allow the student to fly fly fly to drive there own hours up, most airlines want 1000 hours pilot in command time or more.
THE WORST PART! As the training progresses, the school will inflate training cost by saying "the student needs more work" on this area and that, and the cost is driven way up.
The cost of the program is shown in a blue packet that shows glamorous pictures of airline pilots wearing sunglasses while standing near jumbo jets
The school does NOT own many of the aircraft used, and in fact they lease many of them. Some of the Aircraft used by westwind have been involved in serious accidents. Although I don't believe a fatality has resulted, emergency landings are not as rare as I thought they would be. Contact the FAA & NTSB for this data.
Westwind used to use a very old fleet of Cessna 152's but has since gotten rid of many of them. The Aircraft they have now are very new, however I have heard that Westwind is operating in the "Red" in terms of finances and may be right now, this is my opinion and I don't have proof of this.in fact all this is my opinion from my experiences and the countless students who have been victims of this Christian owned company.
I would like to say that I have heard although I do not actually know, that the primary owners are unaware of the level of fraud happening hear.
Some students have spent #25,000 dollars or more on training just for a privates, some without having gotten it, and because they drag training out as much as they do, your cost of living debt can climb very high if your on a loan and not working.
I'm not saying not to go to Westwind, I'm just saying, research it very well, talk to students, not instructors, and visit other schools and talk to their students and do your homework.
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