Gordy says:
I do accept that there is a cost associated with flying out of VNY as a student, because of the flight time to "training areas", but it is no secret. Like others have mentioned, that ferry time is also valuable. A portion of commercial training is straight "hours building". By factoring this extra flight time as part of your "hours building", it does not seem so bad.
Gordy, I respectfully disagree about the time building statement. If the school is doing the commercial correctly there shouldn't be any "hour building". First of all, I'm assuming this is a non-rated pilot, i.e. starting from scratch.
Figure 65 hours to get the private (that's pretty typical of ab-initio students) Of that 10-15 is PIC (i.e. solo) Cross Country (so it counts toward the commercial requirements).
Then figure 40 hours of instrument flying, all of which gets logged as PIC and Cross Country (under the hood) towards the commercial requirement.
That leaves 50 hours to get the commercial.
In my experience, there's no extra there. It takes the full 50 hours to get a new private pilot flying to commercial standards (but the instrument rating helps quite a bit there). If you are having to hour build to reach the required 100 hours PIC time, you're not getting all the training you should be getting.
Smart people get their instructor rating (CFI & CFII) during the same 50 hours they are working on their commercial (just fly the commercial training flights from the instructor seat, explaining the maneuvers). During my commercial training nobody told me I could do that - it was only later that I realized I could have saved some money that way.
If you have to fly 10 minutes each way to the practice area, assuming the above is about 100 lessons, that would consume 33 hours out of your training time! More than that (as described by Ultima 535) is crazy! Granted you can do some things along the way that would be useful (like, some forced landings along the way) but still, that's a lot of mainly straight and level flight...
It's bad enough that you burn about 10 minutes on each flight doing startup and shutdown, adding 20-40 minutes per flight to essentially reposition the aircraft is really a burden on the student. Not only that, but in a situation like that you end up wanting to fly a longer lesson (or an even higher percentage of flight time ends up being repositions). But in my experience past about 1.2 hours students start to fade quickly, and they end up flying but not learning much (because their brain is baked by then). So, why on earth would you want to learn at a school that eats so many training hours to get to/from the practice area? Why not go to a school where the training area is right at the airport (I'll skip plugging my own school, but a school like Northeast Helicopters which is out in cow country would be an example).
We teach at a busy controlled field (not nearly as busy as KVNY but pretty busy) but we have a dedicated taxiway for helicopter training so typically we're there in about a 30 second air taxi. Tower is very good about working with us to minimize delays - they seldom hold us for more than 60 seconds even when it's very busy. We have lots of farmland within 5 minutes of our airport (even though we're just outside Boston) so there's no problem getting out to areas similar to Simi Valley, i.e. open enough to be landing off airport, forced landing practice, etc, but 75% of our flights are right at the airport so there's no time lost going back and forth to a training area. That's been the case at the 4 airports I've taught at over the years - we always have some dedicated airspace at the airport so that we can fly unhindered by other traffic.
But Ultima 535 also brings up the good point that what has changed in recent years is TSA approval/visas that make it much more difficult to change schools for any foreign pilots training here, if it turns out you've been hoodwinked. And, I have to say, I always warn people that flight training is full of flight schools willing to take advantage of students, and helicopter schools even more so.
For the amount of money you're going to invest in private+commercial in the USA it probably makes some sense to visit the school before you go through the whole visa thing. Yes, it'll cost you 2-3 thousand dollars in airfare and hotels, but it's probably money well spent - especially if you can visit 2-3 candidate schools and maybe get some assurances in writing about rates (and, to Ultima 535's point, no secret charges).
BTW, I'll warn all potential students: never EVER give any aviation school large sums of money up front. Silver State was a great example of why not, but there's tons of shady schools out there, and you will never know it until they close their doors and tell you that your money is gone. So, even if they promise you a better rate if you put down large sums of money, don't do it. I would suggest never putting more than $3-5,000 down at a time, i.e. no more than you can afford to lose.
I wouldn't want people overseas to think that you're going to necessarily get ripped off training in the USA. There are lots of great schools here, with great reputations. Still, it makes sense to ask lots of questions and always to talk to a few recent graduates of a school before you commit to going there, and definitely ask about hidden fees and overhead like having to fly away from the airport to get to a training area.