Originally Posted by
GatorAviator
I work at an airport that gets many SFB DCA students, I can say with certainty that over the past two years the students they send to my airport are some of the worst pilots I have ever seen. I saw one who landed so hard the nose gear on the 172 was broke from the airframe. Another student tried 3 times unsuccessfuly to land on a 4 thousand foot runway, eventually she set it down on a 7500 foot runway on her fourth attempt. She landed so hard she thought she bent the main landing gear, and on the taxi in she taxied off the taxiway and nearly took out a taxiway light with the left main. I have my commercial and am currently working on my CFI. I would highly recommend doing your training at the local fbo. It will be cheaper, and with DCA, they may force you to learn the book knowledge but for the most part they don't teach any common sense or how to fly a plane to a level that won't get somebody killed one day. I would NOT recommend DCA under any circumstances whatsoever. Please find a good CFI at a local field or go to any other academy but DCA.
As an escapee from the DCA farm, I'll say this: there are some terrible pilots training--and even instructing--at DCA. There are also some fantastic ones. The same can be said of almost every school/FBO I've encountered. Are the lousy pilots a higher proportion at DCA? Maybe. I don't know. But because of the sheer volume of training done at DCA, even if the ratio isn't problematic, there will simply be more bad pilots in terms of raw numbers.
If you have some statistics to point to saying that DCA's rate of incidents/accidents per X flight hours is significantly worse than average, please point us towards them. If not, let's stick to the more empirical data telling prospective students to train elsewhere like cost, equipment (I still think the SR-20 is terrible training platform, but maybe that's just me), management, lifestyle, regular training delays, dress code, testimonials from former students, the value, or lack thereof, of an accelerated program in the current climate, etc., etc.