Our instructors
Eleven of them. Every one carries a commercial certificate or an ATP underneath, an instructor certificate above it, and a medical in date. This page carries no photographs, no biographies and no quoted students, and further down it explains exactly why.
Who will actually teach you?
One of eleven instructors, matched to you at enrolment, and you may ask for a different one at any point without giving a reason. Each of them carries a commercial certificate or an ATP as the base qualification, an instructor certificate above it, and a medical in date. On every flight until you are signed off to fly alone, that person is the legal pilot in command.
That last sentence is not a courtesy. It is a legal position with consequences, and it is why an assessment flight needs no medical certificate from you and why the responsibility for the airplane does not sit with a student who has never flown one.
Eleven is a deliberate number to publish rather than a boast. A school with two instructors is one holiday away from a stalled syllabus, and the single most common reason a part-time student takes three years over a private certificate is that the calendar never lines up. Depth of staff is a scheduling property before it is anything else.
What we will not do on this page is turn eleven people into eleven marketing assets. No portraits, no first names with hour totals attached, no former employers listed to borrow their reputation. The section further down sets out that decision in full, because a trust page that quietly omits something is worse than one that argues for the omission.
What does a flight instructor have to hold?
More than most people assume, and the requirements are public. 14 CFR 61.183 sets the eligibility floor, 61.23 adds the medical, 61.195 constrains what an instructor may do in a day, and 61.197 decides whether the certificate keeps working.
61.183 — what it takes to be issued the certificate
An applicant is at least eighteen, and English proficiency is required in the usual four skills. Beneath the instructor certificate sits either a commercial certificate or an ATP, and its category and class rating has to suit whichever instructor rating is being applied for. Where that rating calls for one, an instrument rating is required too.
There is also a knowledge test on the fundamentals of instructing, endorsed by an authorised instructor under 61.183(d) and drawn from the areas listed at 61.185. That test is about teaching rather than flying, and it is the part that surprises pilots who assumed the rating was simply more flying.
- At least eighteen years of age
- A commercial certificate or an ATP underneath
- A category and class rating matching the instructor rating
- An instrument rating where the rating requires one
- A fundamentals of instructing knowledge test
61.195 — the limits on what an instructor may do
One figure is worth memorising: 61.195(a) caps an instructor at eight hours of flight training inside any twenty-four consecutive hours. It exists because fatigue in the right seat is a safety problem and not a productivity problem, and it is a genuine constraint on how quickly any school can move a full-time student.
Do the arithmetic before you believe an accelerated timeline. Eight hours is a ceiling and not a target, most instructors sit well below it on an ordinary day, and a school promising a rate that requires the cap to be hit repeatedly is describing a schedule nobody survives.
61.19(d) and 61.197 — the certificate, and keeping it live
This changed recently and a great deal of published material has not caught up. 61.19(d) now issues an instructor certificate without any expiration date, provided it was issued from 1 December 2024 onward. Anything issued before then runs twenty-four calendar months, counted from whichever month brought it into being: issue, renewal or reinstatement.
What replaced the expiry is recent experience. 61.197 requires an instructor to satisfy one of several routes within the preceding twenty-four calendar months in order to exercise the privileges: passing a practical test for a rating on the certificate or an additional one, meeting an endorsement record over that period, serving in a checking or evaluating role in a part 121 or 135 operation, completing an approved refresher course, or a military or FAA-programme equivalent.
- Certificates issued from 1 December 2024 do not expire
- Earlier certificates ran twenty-four calendar months
- Privileges still depend on recent experience under 61.197
- Several routes exist and a refresher course is one of them
How are you matched to an instructor, and how do you change?
Four steps, and the third is the one worth reading. Nobody teaches well with every student and nobody learns well from every instructor, and pretending otherwise costs students money.
The assessment flight
You fly with an instructor before anybody has taken an enrolment. That hour is as much an assessment of us as of you, and it is deliberately structured so that you handle the airplane rather than watch somebody else handle it.
The match at enrolment
You are assigned a primary instructor for the phase, chosen against your schedule and the airplane you will be flying. Continuity matters more in the early phases than almost anything else, because a syllabus taught by five people is taught five times.
Changing, without a conversation about why
Ask, and it is done. No reason is required and none is asked for. A student who is not learning from a particular instructor is not a failure of either party; it is a fit problem, and it costs money for every hour it goes unaddressed.
Stage checks with somebody else
At phase boundaries you fly with an instructor who is not your own. It catches the things a familiar pairing stops noticing, and it is standard practice for good reasons rather than an inconvenience.
Is instruction included in the program price?
Yes, and this is the part worth being precise about. Instruction sits inside every program figure below. The $179 hourly rate published elsewhere on this site is the airplane and its fuel for enrolled students and it is not an instructor rate; no instructor rate is published anywhere here.
Airline Career Track
Every phase from the first logged hour to a flight instructor rating, priced once and fixed at the point of enrolment.
- ✓Five phases under a single number
- ✓Financing from $2,500 down
- ✓No repricing at a phase boundary
- ✓Part 61 from start to finish
Private Pilot — Comprehensive
Sixty hours in the logbook: fifty-five airborne, five in the box, fifty flown dual, plus ten hours of ground school.
- ✓60 hours logged
- ✓5 simulator sessions
- ✓10 hours of ground school
- ✓Books and materials included
Instrument Rating
Phase two of the career route, and the rating that changes how you fly more than any other single step.
- ✓40 instrument hours under 61.65(d)
- ✓An IFR cross-country of 250 nautical miles
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
Multi-Engine Add-On
The class rating that opens twin-engine flying, and later the ability to instruct in one.
- ✓No hour floor under 61.63(c)(3)
- ✓Ten to fifteen hours is typical
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
What can be verified about the instructors?
Four regulatory facts and one commercial one, none of which requires you to trust an adjective. This is what a trust page looks like when the school is too new to have a reputation.
Eight hours of flight instruction in twenty-four
A hard cap in the regulation rather than a policy of ours, and a useful test to apply to any accelerated timeline you are quoted. Most instructors work well below it on an ordinary day.
14 CFR 61.195(a)Airframe types on the ramp, owned rather than brokered
Cessna 162 Skycatcher, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Diamond DA20, Cirrus SR22 Turbo and Piper Seminole. The airplanes belong to the operation, so the maintenance calendar is ours and not a lessor’s.
Inspected under 14 CFR 91.409(b)Instructors working here
Each carries a commercial certificate or an ATP beneath, an instructor certificate above it, and a medical in date. You are matched with one of them, and you may ask for another if the fit is wrong.
14 CFR 61.183 · 61.23 · 61.195Training-capable days measured across twelve months at this field
Counted from NOAA ASOS observations for the year ending 1 August 2026, admitting a day only where the ceiling held at 3,000 feet with five statute miles of visibility across four qualifying daylight hours.
NOAA ASOS via the Iowa Environmental MesonetA session in the full-motion simulator
Two of those sessions sit inside the Standard and the Premium private pilot programs and five inside the Comprehensive, and weather never takes one away.
Published, not quoted on requestWhy are there no photographs or biographies here?
Because we have not photographed the instructors yet, and because the biographies that flight schools publish are almost always unverifiable. Both halves of that are worth saying out loud rather than papering over with stock imagery.
Take the photographs first. There is no picture of an instructor on this site, no picture of a lesson in progress and no picture of the classroom, for the plain reason that nobody has taken any. Buying stock photographs of somebody else’s flight school and captioning them as ours would be a lie told in an image, which is still a lie. When the shoot happens, real pictures of real people will appear here.
The biographies are a harder argument and a more important one. A typical instructor profile carries a total-hours figure, a list of former employers and a sentence about a passion for teaching. A reader cannot verify any of it. The hours are self-reported, the airline logo is borrowed reputation, and the passion is unfalsifiable. We are not publishing a set of claims that a stranger has no way to check.
What is publishable is the standard every instructor meets, which is set by regulation and identical for all of them, together with the number of them and the fact that you can change. That is less warm and considerably more useful.
Here is the position, stated plainly. There is no review anywhere on this site, no rating, and no quoted student, and none will appear until this school has earned them on its own profile. In a market where one operator advertises a guaranteed instructor job and another advertises a perfect checkride record, publishing what we cannot yet demonstrate is the most credible thing available to us.
For a reader who wants to judge the teaching, no page beats the obvious: fly the assessment flight and judge the instructor in the right seat for an hour. That is a real sample of the thing you are buying.
What is not published about the people who work here
No instructor is named on this site, no total-hours figure is attributed to any of them, and no airline any instructor has previously worked for is mentioned. Those claims would not be checkable by a reader and one of them would borrow another company’s reputation. No student quotation, review or rating appears here either.
Airline Pilot Flight School trains under part 61 of 14 CFR, at Van Nuys Airport. It is not an airline, it is not owned by one, and no carrier holds a cadet program, pathway agreement or hiring arrangement with us. We do not guarantee an interview, a job or a salary.
No pass rate, no graduate count and no rating of any kind is published on this site. The operation is new, any such figure would come from a sample too small to mean anything, and inventing one is the easiest lie available in this industry. What is published instead is the syllabus, the price, the hours and the regulation behind each requirement.
Instructor questions
Eleven. That figure is published because it is a scheduling fact rather than a compliment: with eleven instructors a syllabus does not stall when one person takes a week off, which is the most common reason a part-time private certificate stretches into a third year.
14 CFR 61.183 asks for eighteen years of age, English proficiency, and a commercial certificate or an ATP whose category and class rating suits the instructor rating being sought. An instrument rating is required on top where the rating calls for one. A knowledge test on the fundamentals of instructing sits alongside it, endorsed under 61.183(d).
Until you are endorsed to fly solo, yes. That is why an assessment flight requires no medical certificate from you and why responsibility for the airplane does not rest on a student who has never flown one. Once you are soloing, command shifts to you for those flights and the instructor is not aboard.
Yes, by asking, and no explanation is required. A poor fit between a student and an instructor is not anybody’s failure, and every hour it goes unaddressed is an hour of money spent on friction rather than on learning. Raise it early rather than politely enduring it.
Eight, and 14 CFR 61.195(a) is where that ceiling sits. It applies across any twenty-four consecutive hours. It is a fatigue limit, not a target, and most instructors are comfortably below it on a normal day. It is also a useful arithmetic check on any accelerated schedule you are offered anywhere.
It depends when the certificate was issued. 14 CFR 61.19(d) issues them without an expiration date from 1 December 2024 onward. Anything older runs twenty-four calendar months from whichever month brought it into being. Either way, privileges still depend on meeting a recent-experience route under 61.197 within the preceding twenty-four calendar months.
Because nobody has taken them yet. Using stock photography of another school’s people and presenting it as ours would be a lie told in a picture. When the photographs exist they will appear here, and until then this page tells you what it can substantiate instead.
Because a reader cannot verify them. Total-hours figures are self-reported, a list of former employers borrows somebody else’s reputation, and a stated passion for teaching cannot be falsified. What is publishable is the regulatory standard every instructor meets, which is identical for all of them and checkable by anybody.
Mostly. You are matched with a primary instructor for each phase, because continuity matters more in early training than almost anything else. At phase boundaries you fly a stage check with somebody other than your own instructor, which catches what a familiar pairing has stopped noticing.
No, and there is nowhere on this site that does. The school is new, and any rating it published would either be borrowed from another business or invented. Reviews will appear only when this school’s own profile carries real ones, and then only the number that profile actually shows on the day.
The rest of the school
What replaces the reviews
Our fleetFull motion simulator trainingFlying days and training tempoPart 61 training structureThe only honest sample of the teaching is an hour of it
Nothing written on a page tells you whether somebody can teach. Book an assessment flight, sit in the left seat, and judge the person in the right one. That is a real sample of the product, and it comes off the program price in full if you go ahead.
Fly the aeroplane once, then decide
The assessment flight is the first hour of the syllabus and a two-way evaluation. You fly it from the left seat with an instructor beside you, they write down what they saw, and you get an honest read on whether the plan is realistic. It is loggable, and it is credited in full against enrolment if you enroll within 24 hours.
What happens on an assessment flight →