Well, I can’t resist this one and yes, I’ve got an axe to grind. A new identity because I don’t want Dylan the office manager ringing me up or threatening me in any manner.
My gripe with LFS is that I was quite happily slowly doing my PPL with them and then one day BAM, a letter in the post, we’ve dropped you like a hot potatoe and the thrust was we’re not doing any more PPL because LFS is now a pofessional school teaching commercial pilots. I rang up and got some excuses about costs at Leeds airport etc. As you can imagine I was angry with the way I was treated and still am.
They’re a lovely bunch of people altho theres a lot of politics. The aircraft were a bit tatty but they were improving them when I left. The owner is Tony and he’s very pleasant. His son John did some of my training and he was very quiet but a lovely lad and no problems at all. The was an older instructor called James who I did a few flights with and he was straight by the book. I think he’s gone now to the airlines. Then there were other fellows who did weekend work and I flew with a couple (too many really), the really experienced but quite odd fellow Stewart who looks nothing like an instructor but you could just tell he knew his trade and then Kevin who seemed to do all the advanced stuff and sat in the simulator a lot. He had a lot to say. Now I can see where Horris is coming from to be blunt, because Kevin did like to hold an audience and he could tell a good story. I don’t know whether he actually really thinks hes the best around, but I did hear him say so much on more than one occasion and he made a big deal of telling everyone that his way was the only way. To be honest, I was quite frightened of having him as my PPL examiner. What really annoyed me though was the fact that he would run people down behind their back. Instructors, examiners, students, the universe. I sat there on the sofa with a coffee, listening to ‘so and so’s a fool’, ‘we only want to use Tony’s money I’d wish he’d go and stop elsewhere’, ‘I’m the only one who gets anything done around here’ and so on. I don’t think anyone took him very seriously but I heard to much - more than I wanted to know as a customer. The worst moment was when he invited me into his office for a chat, which seemed quite an honour at first but turned into the Spanish inquisiton about my instructors - basically he told me they were all !!!!e and that he had to lift the standards. As far as I was concerned they were great. I felt uncomfortable because it seemed like he was just out to make trouble.
There you go. I think this is a fair picture, but I have not been back for a year. Daren’t go back now!