PPL Flight School - what to look for
My apologies if this subject has been covered. I tried the search feature, but couldn't find a thread that contained the information I'm looking for (but if you know of one...).
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in the US, and would like to know several things before I choose a flight school. Just FYI, I want to get my PPL, then add the instument rating sometime later, so for now I'm focused mainly on the PPL. I don't plan to fly professionally, but I'd be curious to know about the differences between Part 141 and Part 61(?) training.
I'm really interested in what to look for in a "high quality" flight school, one that produces both very safe and very knowledgable pilots. For example, what kind of ground school instruction should I look for? What should I look for in a "good" instructor? What areas of instruction do you think are a "must" and should be included in an exceptional flight school?
Any recommendations (and why) for an exceptional flight school would be greatly appreciated, as there are a number of flight schools to choose from in my area. For example, I found a flight school the other day that owns 4 or 5 brand new Cessna C-172SPs (oldest appears to be a '98) and took a demo flight in one of them (a 1999 model). What a really nice airplane and a joy to fly (I flew most of the flight except for the takeoff and landing). I'd just love to train in aircraft like these! The instructor took me through a thorough pre-flight check, and appeared to be very competent. However the school doesn't offer much in the way of a ground school (just a CBT course with a bunch of CDs).
Many thanks in advance.