Are ailerons, engines and avionics required to be airworthy?

Here in Phoenix, we have about 350 VFR, non-sigmet days a year. Today isn't one of them, so I'm trying to catch up on with blogging, which I am new to.

Flight school is expensive. Duh. How stupid must we be to pay nearly $100K to go earn $20K our firts year? Oh well, we all know how stupid we are and that's ok. At least we will be flying, right?

Because of Arizona's fabulous VFR weather, there are a ton of flight schools here. Why did I go to Florida and look? I wanted to see if there was anything better there.

Locally, I looked at five other flight schools before I chose mine. One of the bigger ones is named after a once glamorous, now-defunt airline. The admission rep took me on a tour of their sim facilities (nice) and flight line. On the way to the flight line, he shows me their maintenance hangar and brags about their 4 diamond rating. On the flight line, he takes me to a Seminole. It's missing the starboard engine. He takes me to another Seminole, the avionics are comletely gone. Let's go check out a Cadet. OK. The first one he takes me to is missing ailerons! I'm really impressed now.

He takes me back to the offices and hands me off to a CFI and tells him to take me on a discovery flight. I tell the CFI that I know what it's like to fly in a Cherokee and have already decided that I am going to flight school. Which one is the question. Get this...he actually tells me not to go to this school. They have contracts with China Airlines, Korean Airlines and KLM. Those contract students get the best planes, best dispatch slots etc. Thinking back to my recent trip to the school in FL that is owned by a bankrupt airline that whose name is the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet, I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Stay away from schools that have large contracts with foreign carriers. Plus the aircraft in various states of disrepair ON THE FLIGHTLINE kind of freaked me out too. Scratch another school off the list. This list is getting short quickly.

I had made an appointment to see a school called ATP. They seem to be pretty large. They have locations all over the country. Well, the one here in Phoenix is rather small. They do have nice aircraft, but it seemed a little disorganized. It reminded me more of an FBO flight school than a 141/142 school. I don't really feel negative about them, it just didn't seem right for me.

At the same airport, I checked out the Mesa Air/UND pilot develpment program. Great progam for young people in college. They have VERY nice Beech a/c and it is a solid program. The man in charge is a great guy. We chatted for almost an hour and he pointed me to a school I had never heard of before: ACME ACADEMY. They just happened to be at the same airport so I dropped in without an appointment.

The admissions/sales rep greeted me and gave me a tour of the school. They have two locations: The main campus in Florida and at Williams Gateway Airport in Mesa, AZ. The fleet is not even close to being new, but the maintenance crew works hard. I don't really care how old the aircraft is as long as it is well maintained. They also didn't have a problem letting me speak with several current and former students. Other schools were kinda sketchy about that. I did more research and found out that the owner, JOHN DOE is a pretty stand-up guy. They are growing, thriving and serious about maiking GOOD pilots.

My only problem was the age of the school. They've been in business less than 10 years. They had a fixed price program that includes: private, instrument, commercial, CME, CFI, CFI-II and a CL-65 type rating from CAE aerospace. I wanted that program, but I didn't want to give them all of the money up front. They were willing to work with me. I shook hands right there and commited to them.

I started there 4/1/06. I will update this very soon with the experience I've had so far. Hopefully, it will be interesting and helpful to somebody.