Flying Academy Experience
Hi guys,
Flying Academy has a good website and a good advertisement team in Prague, so it attracts some students. But they don’t reflect all the reality.
The school has a better facility comparing to some other schools in Czech Republic.
You can start the PPL any day you arrive. This is true. Because there are many instructors but with very less Flight Instructor (FI) hours. Except 1-2 instructors, the rest has completed their FI training over the last 1 year. So they have a little experience of teaching. Some of them have even just becomean FI. You may be their first student.
The aircrafts are really old and having problems. You can fly with no Turn Indicator, no Attitude Indicator, no Heading Indicator, broken radio, no GPS…The students are sent to flights in these conditions many times and this is normal for Flying Academy Management. I have many photos indicating this.
The school is located at an international airport. Before you start your training, it sounds like an advantage. You can experience the aviation phraseology in a better way. You may take off after RyanAir or WizAir with your small aircraft. Brno is a D Class Controlled Airspace (CTR), so your every movement in the CTR is controlled by the Tower like you will experience in an Airliner. However this comes with a major cost. The full stop landing and Touch&Go cost for Cessna 152 is 120 CZK (for C-172 it’s 160 CZK) and communication fee is 160 CZK in Brno. If you start your training in an ATZ (uncontrolled airspace), there will be NO communication fee and the landing fee will be 10 CZK, maybe 30 CZK at the most. You will be able to enter any CTR whenever you want during your flights and you will have the same experience with much lesser cost. In Flying Academy you will pay 1,500 USD extra after 150 flights due to landing and communicationc osts! They are hiding these costs in their web-site and offers.
By the way, in Brno Airport, there are discounts for minimum hours spent within 1 month. If you exceed these minimum flight hours within 1 month, your costs are reduced up to 65%. However Flying Academy does not reflect this discount to the students. I leave it at your judgment.
There are delays frequently for the flights due to lack of management and disorganization. If you are scheduled as the last flight of the day or the one before, all students know that they will not fly due to delays. Your day will be wasted with waiting. With the disorganization, they can put you on a flight after sunset even if you don’t have the night rating J
This disorganization applies for serious issues as well and get worse. In the last summer, some university students came to school to complete their PPL in summer. But the school forgot to sign them up for the theoretical exams. Imagine the next exam is in 1 month, and the time that these students lost. These students had to go back to university with 1 month delay in order to complete their PPL.
Also the school forgot to sign up Instrument Rating students for English Exam of CAA.They had to wait for a whole month with doing nothing and spending money for accommodation and food.
Another thing.. After you complete your PPL, or Night Rating or CPL; they need to issue the license for you and this process requires just a couple of documents. They always miss some documents and may call you to come to school for each document. Your medical, next time for your Power of Attorney, next time for your License.. If you go back to your country and you think meanwhile your license is being issued, you may receive a call/e-mail which tells you that they forgot to take a document from you and you can’t give this document because you are hundreds of kms away. So enjoy your time off J
The school lost Medical License, PPL/CPL License, Logbook of students during license issue as well J
For all the important things, you need to communicate with a guy named Peter and you can be sure that not even 1 student in the school likes him; not even the instructors. He basically doesn’t care about any of your problems and he even gives you even more. His life achievement is unknown J
The school doesn’t have a good relation with the CAA and consequently they are having problems to arrange checkrides. IR students waited 1 month for checkride in the summer of 2015.
CPL students waited approximately 2 months for the fix of Piper (for MEP).
The school has only 2 aircraft and 1 full-time instructor for the IR Training J It is the biggest obstacle here, amongthe others. All the students are stucked on this stage.
Even though it wasn’t in the contract, the school charged the IR students, as a surprise J, with briefing and de-briefing costs (10.000 CZK) after they completed their training. The students already paid for the Instructor Fee. When you are paying to an instructor, you expect from him to teach you. And in order to teach, the instructor needs to open his mouth J But basically the school charged the students for having the instructors to speak! There were many arguments after this and the management’s final word was “We don’t care, even it’s not inthe agreement”. Now I see that they started to put this cost in the contracts of new students which is ridiculous.
The school is also charging the students with IR English Training (50 hours). You don’t need this training and they don’t give you even 1 hour of this training but they charge you with 10.000 CZK. Maybe the new cost is more now..
They also charged the students for the Pilot Insurance with 5.000 CZK. It wasn't in the contract. They didn’t give anybody certificates. We assume that they made a profit from here.
At the end of the training, the whole training cost will be more than the other schools.
Finally ,the accommodation facilities of the school are exactly 1 hour away from the school. It is stated as half an hour in advertisement which is not true. Everyday round-trip will be 2 hours which is very long for a city like Brno.
It is really hard to embrace Flying Academy as your training center. Unfortunately it is more like a commercial center.
Make your research carefully and decide wisely.
Wish you best of luck…
Last edited by flybywiree; 16th Mar 2016 at 13:25.
Reason: wording and spacing mistakes