Hi,
I'm a student pilot from middle europe and I'd like to
share my experience that I had with EFT („European Flight Training“) in
Fort Pierce, Florida, in the beginning of the year 2012, because after all i've seen there, I decided to share my experience with other people. I'm the holder
of a PPL-A licence and, like many other pilots that would like to make
their hobby a profession, I only saw the way of modular training as
realistic for me. I completed my ATPL-theory with the CAA in London
and soon afterwards, started to look for a proficient school to teach
me the practical part. I found myself in a situation where I had to
find a suitable FTO in few time, and soon my eyes fell on EFT, where
things seemed to work out really un-complicated. Quickly I enroled
myself into the 3 weeks Single Engine CPL-course. Now, quite
some time afterwards and with enough distance in between, it's still
hard for me to hide all the disappointement and anger that this school
caused to me. I would like to point out one thing before I go ahead
with my report: EFT offers contact to former students on their homepage
to make it possible for you to get a better picture of them. The
downside is: they choose theirself wich student would be allowed to
share it's experience and somebody that has to say negative things
would not appear on this list. If I had known before what I know now, I
would have never choosen that school...
One of the inherent problems with EFT is the organisation of your
training. As any interested person may already know, the SE-CPL course
consists of 25h of dual training, wich is a legal minima and it's
probably quite often the case that pilots need 2 or 3 hours more.
However, EFT does not go by your hours, but by your flights. The 25h,
wich are a reasonable air-time minima to get you in shape for your
checkride, are sub-divided into 18 flights. These do not take into
account any ground or taxi-time, wich, especially for a pilot
unfamiliar with Fort Pierce, the planes and the local procedures, could
easily make out 0.5 or 0.6h each flight! For that reason, a flight that
should not take longer than 1.0h or 1.2h on the paper, regulary lasts
for 1.5h or 1.8h. Given the charges for each lesson, this easily sums
up into 2500 to 3000$ in addition at the end of your course – just like
this! Besides, the charge rates will go up for each minute that you
have to spend above the claimed minima (even if you spend no time on
the ground and do all the lessons perfectly, they will find reasons why
you should repeat lessons – believe me). In my eyes, everything is
shaped to rip people off. I personally completed the course in
almost the minimum time with just 1 flight to be repeated and I found
those extra 3000$ on my bill.
Of course, nothing in life is ever only black or white. One of the good
things with EFT is that they have a reasonable fleet (about 7 Cessna
172 and 7 PA-28 and about the same amount of Duchesses), wich they
keep in a good technical condition. The only thing about their planes
that bothered me is that there was only one Piper Arrow as complex
single for the advanced CPL-course, wich had it's best days definitely
behind it. One careless landing or worn out oil-line could have easily
spoiled my stay there. Besides, the accommodation is quite acceptable
(every place gets boring after several weeks or months if cou can't get
out, of course) and there are indeed a few nice instructors with EFT
(tough not all – try to get Martin, if you are already there). The
school buildings are far from unfashionable and there is even a big
library and a pool available to all students.
However, after I completed the course and withstood all the many
difficulties
and little problems, my class and me were waiting for our checkride.
To make a long story short, the examiner failed
the entire class on their checkrides, with reasons so ridiculous and
unfair that we probably all will have problems to explain our fails to
future employes.
Since that time, for a mystic reason, nobody from that school passed
the checkride on the first attempt with him – ever! According to a
staff from European Flight Training, this already went on since 2 years
without the school ever trying to interfere with this. Many people from my class complained about
this practise and tried to get EFT to request another examiner, but
they only earned ignorance and scorn from the managers. Somebody
formulated a (in my eyes) very cautious writing to request a change of
examiner to the Head of Training, Trevor Brackston, with the grounds of
time - weekends only, wich soon ate
into our money-reserves, of course), Trevor even didn't answer him, but
quit looking at us. When we then inquired Matthew Adams about this, he got
furious and threw people out of his office! Yes, thats right – this is
the way you get treat at EFT once you get into problems and request
help! People were always friendly before, but as soon as you signal to
them you start to get out of money, they will not care about you in any
way (to sort something out here, I am perfectly aware that the examiner is assigned by CAA to you and not by the school, however, there was an incidence a few weeks before wich caused a student to change the examiner under similar circumstances with the help of the school, so obviously, there is a way– you just need to want it, though). Somebody else who dragged up the Flight Examiners Handbook and found a graph indicating that no student may fly with the same examiner after a failed checkride again gotrejected by Trevor, too, who tried to solve the situation by just twisting the words of the handbook against him.
Is it normal for a whole class to fail in a row? We got the
impression they rather wanted to play along with the examiner. In the
meantime, a few others were totally out of money and left Florida again without their licences.
The net result with EFT for me was:
Expected duration and costs of the course (estimated by EFT): 3 weeks
and 7305$ + CAA fee (about 1000$)
Total duration and costs: 7 weeks, about 16000$ spent (incl. 19 flights
in my course, 4 more weeks of accommodation & food, CAA fee, shifted
flights back)
And it could have easily ended without my licence here.
I'm aware that my report about this school may seem one-sided and
subjective and maybe you understand why I don't want to reveal to manydetails of my person. However, after all the disappointement and thebad experience I had, I feel this is the most honest report I can give
you about this place. I have visited a few bad FTO's in my career so
far and I didn't expect everything to happen perfectly this time
(instead, I tried to arrive with reserves in my planning and pushed my
progress every day), but after all, I found this school exceptionally
money-orientated and unfair.
The whole training-system is shaped to
aquire your money and the responsibles at the school show you
surprisingly honest how less they care about you once you have a
problem – you will pay a lot and people forget this very quickly. To
give you another episode, several people of my class encountered
problems because they used the wrong performance-graphs for their
preflight-preparations.
After almost 2 months, nobody in the school
ever noticed this, although theoretically, the staff in dispatch should
have their eyes on this. It was a stupid mistake, but you also could
see it as an indication how much EFT cares about their students. Many
people I met complained about being left alone, in many aspects. I
passed my checkride some time later with another examiner (and without
having any substantial amount of training in between). I can not
recommend this school to my fellow students or to anyone else. As long
as you are just looking for a place that somehow gets the job done,
regardless of time or money, EFT may eventually be a school like many
others. For the rest, I think its safe if I take voice for the others and say that few people had a good time in the end. If you are dependent on an FTO that supplies you with a
purposeful and inexpensive training, there is only one thing I can
advise you: AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!