TakeoffAL

Has anyone heard about the Texas Flight in Houston and can give me some info/opinion? They are fairly new (2008) they are quoting their training from private to CFI at around $57,000. TIA

Cheese7

I did a checkout flight and rented a 172 to take some friends up for the day when I was in Houston about a year ago. I thought they had a pretty good operation there. They seemed like a hybrid between a mom-n-pop style Part 61 school and a big box flight school. Like most Part 61 schools, it all depends on your instructor. A good/bad one can make or break your flight training experience. I just did one flight with them, so it's just one small data point, but my instructor was pretty good (compared to other "time-building" instructors I have flown with). As far as the costs go, I don't know if you're on a tight budget and paying in cash, or if you're planning on taking out a huge loan and paying all at once. You could probably get all your ratings done for less than that if you pay by the flight. You'll just need to watch your costs closely, be very prepared for every lesson so that you don't need to repeat as many flights, and be economical about how you build your hours for your instrument rating and between your instrument rating and commercial rating. If you split time (hood time / simulated instrument time) with a buddy in a similar place in their training as you, you will cut your costs considerably.

deftone

I did some of my Private there before I had to move due to work commitments. Its a good school with some well maintained aircraft. The issue I had was that there was quite a turnover of instructors. They tended to hire the more seasoned CFIs away from the smaller schools once they had some experience instructing, but this meant there was a shorter time until they reached ATP mins. I lost one CFI to Mesa and one to Boutique.