I think it's more of a financial problem than a reputation problem. The program was designed to have 6 cadets per class per month. This was a problem from the start although they did fill a couple classes with 6. There were classes of 2 and 4 in the early months of 2004. I was told that the price would go up from $65,500 to $80,000 if I didn't sign up for the June 2004 class. So naturally I did. But then they allowed classes to sign up until November at the $65,500 level, which really peeved me off since I could have been making and saving more money before I jumped into the program.

People started to bail on the program here and there. Three people in my original class bailed. One after PVT, one shortly into INST, and one after INST. I believe almost an entire class of November bailed (3 out of 4). They then decided that they were going to increase the cost of the program to $80,000 now that they got some people hired. It never really made sense to me why they moved so fast with the price increase considering it got even harder to get cadets into the door. Some of us noticed an immediate decline in the quality of people walking in the door. Not everyone, but a lot. I even heard a rumor that one of the cadets was screwing a high school girl. How's that for quality for you? So we figured CAPT was letting in anyone with a check at that point. They used to work under the policy that their training is elite and that you WILL get through it, and if not, it's their fault. That tune changed quickly to "get her done" so we can get you out the door. And I noticed their quality of training went down as time passed. When I signed up, they were advertising 550 hours to total time (they played semantics and said that included pilot monitoring time a.k.a. watch someone else fly). They then expanded on that and said, okay, you're actually getting 250 hours of flight time. Then that got turned into 225 where they kept it. The program was originally advertised as 10-12 months. And the initial classes discovered that timeline was not going to happen when I walked into the program. That's when I realized I might be in trouble, but CAPT kept telling us that we would be the first class to be on schedule so I kept on trucking. And things just didn't work out that way. My class graduated in 18 months. They didn't run as efficient an engine as they could have. For example, I remember many weeks where my interaction with CAPT would be 3 hours a day. With their ground class requirements, that just draaaaaaaged out our training schedule. And the best is when you go to the flight line and you get NAC-ed (pronounced nacked), meaning No Air Craft...so flight training draaaaaaaged too. They then got this brilliant idea toward the end of my time there to run a 7 day operation instead of 5, which was spotty at best.

From a business prospective, I would think it'd be easier to get people in at the $65,500 level than the $80,000 level. You figure if you can fill a class of 6 at $65,500, that's $393,000. Once the price went up, they were getting 2 to a class. That math is easy: $160,000. I'm sure you can figure out what was happening there. So in a nutshell, they lost monthly revenue due to their inability to fill each monthly class to the capacity of 6 per class as per their business model. They also spent a lot of money catering to airlines who would come in and flat out tell us their minimums are higher than what we'll graduate with. The last two was NetJets (which was basically an invitation to the CAPT CFIs to jump ship) and AmericanEagle, who reduced their minimums for the program to 400/100. Still too high since you're walking out of CAPT with 225TT with less than 100 hours of multi.

They also had this funny standards policy where if you didn't pass a section of training 3 times (3 strikes you're out), you're out the door. I think two people fell into that category. But they shouldn't be flying to begin with from what I hear from the CFIs and DEs. And those two people, from what I understand had like 7 or 8 strikes in one section. Conclusion? People washing out = refund of money = bad for business. And it caused a world of politics for the rest of us since we were working hard to stay out of the strike zone, and these folks were getting leniency like nobody's business.

A lot of fat could have been trimmed from their operation but they wanted to do what they wanted to do. I could write a book or get hired as a fast track business efficiency consultant! LOL!