Hello all,
I took an intro flight the other day and it was sweet! I got to experience some zero g moves and some other cool stuff, and of course take the controls.
Yesterday, I received an acceptance email.
I have some sorting out to do but, I’m thinking about a February start in San Diego.
Can anyone speak to how busy this location is?
Ideally at the end I’d like to stay there and teach too, however, I understand I may not have a say in that.
Tim,
I am not sure about specifics on San Diego, but all of the locations have a very similar instructor to student ratio.
Chris
Thanks Chris
Hi Tim,
San Diego is a busy location and growing. We just took more office space to handle the growth. I made a previous post about why you might want to consider a CFI job outside of ATP, even if your desired location is available when you are ready. In short I’m observing more than half the CFIs not getting many flight hours per month and being unable to earn more than the lowest tier of $8.63 per hour.
I think ATP is a good place to do your flight training, but I’m not convinced it’s a good place to work as a CFI building up to 1,500 hours.
Andy
Hey Andy,
Thank you for the insight. I’m confused why you would say that CFIs aren’t getting many flight hours if the location is busy and growing. Are you in San Diego? Regardless, this program won’t really work for me unless I can take advantage of tuition reimbursement.
Tim
I am in San Diego. That’s what you hear when hanging out at the training center - most CFIs make $8.63 per hour which means they are flying less than 60 hours per month (you can see this on ATP’s website)
Its down to the student to instructor ratio.
Why are you focused on tuition reimbursement? That’s only $5 per flight hour. If you fly 70 hours per month that’s $350. Better than nothing but it hardly seems to make or break the decision on whether to spend $80k+ on flight training. If you plan on being a career airline pilot then you can conceivably make 100-300k per year later in your career, hence there is value in getting that career started quickly.
ATP is a good place to get all your ratings as quickly as it can reasonably be done. It’s just that once you have your ratings it seems to be very difficult to average more than 60 flight hours per month as an ATP CFI.
Good luck with your decision!
Andy
Thanks Andy.
Hopefully I’ll be down there sooner rather than later.