The Decision

I began in earnest to check pricing, pick my school, and decide on an instructor. I pretty much had already decided though. Blue Ash Aviation is about 5 minutes from my work if the traffic lights are red and the Diamond was the lowest cost plane out of all of the training planes that I had considered. I also felt very comfortable with Cameron when we were going though weather briefing and pre-flight prior to the introduction flight. I think that having an instructor that you feel is confident and knowledgeable and that also suits you personality is an important step. You will be spending quite a bit of time with them during the training. I think that I’ve picked a good one. AOPA has a lot of information and tips for selecting a flight school and an instructor on their website at http://flighttraining.aopa.org/learntofly/school/ . Blue Ash Aviation also had a stimulus package of their own going on. If you prepay for a block of 50 hours worth of airplane time, you get the airplane hours charged to you at a 10% discount as you use them and if you put more then $3000 on account you got an additional $150 and 30 gallons of fuel added to your account. With both of these discounts, I think I will have the best value for my training dollars. The next big thing was to get some flight training scheduled. I checked the training schedule online and was not able the find any time for the next week and a half when the Diamond, Cameron, and myself were all available. I scheduled Tuesday March 31st at 5:00 pm and Saturday April 4th at noon and it was a long week and a half wait.