Originally Posted by
Cubdriver
Well, the original poster Mr. Hughey came here because he wanted to hear what professional pilots had to say about Delta Connection Academy, and hopefully he will listen to the answer. Perhaps it would be useful to point out however that in certain turns of the road it is arguably worthwhile to purchase a high-cost education from a large pilot academy like Delta Connection, AllATPs, or similar. It so happens those conditions do not exist right now and probably will not for years to come. Since he asked I would say there are several factors you need going it if you are considering a large flight academy, such as
1) money is generally not an issue for the student, and he or she is able and willing to spend a lot more money in order to get to an airline job faster
2) loans are readily available at reasonable interest rates, if money is an issue
3) regional airlines are hiring at healthy rates and have been for a while
4) the airlines business is generally in good shape, pilots are flowing through to the majors, the backlog of furloughs is low, and the US economy as a whole is in good shape
5) there is no 1500-hour minimum requirement in order to be hired at an airline
6) the school itself is managed properly, and there is little doubt about its longterm viability
These are just a few of the things I would want to be present before I would shell out the extra cash to a large flight academy for training rather than slog it out cert by cert at Part 61 flight school gathering certificates as my discretionary income allowed. An FAA certificate is an FAA certificate no matter where it is obtained, and the airlines regard all flight tickets the same.
It certainly seems to be true that the airlines regard flight training as flight training (unless as Rickair7777 likes to say - it says Uncle Sam after it
), but others will point to the networking available through the large, well established college programs or pilot-mill schools. You'll read on these forums that networking is more important than the knowledge - so there is that undeterminal aspect to that type of training.
I definitely think that it will be the experience gained AFTER (or during the time you are getting your ratings) that is going to set a pilot apart from the masses - not including that one or two heaven-send contacts that you might make along the way!
I think in the end Cub is right in the long term sense; maybe there was a time and place for a big initial outlay of cash and short training time to gt started on that road to the airlines where seniority meant everything, but times are different in the business right now and ideas have to change along with them. Slow and steady seems to be the more practical endeavor right now. I mean every point of Cub's post above tracks back to something in the industry that isn't quite in line with his requirements right now. Not one of two items in a long list - but every one of them
I'm sure that other guys could come up with even more.
USMCFLYR