I am getting ready to choose a flight school once i finish my private checkride here in a week or So. I am debating if ATP is the best place for me. I know it is very exccelerated which is no problem for me and extremely expensive but i know that will pay off later in the career, but I have heard numerous stories why ATP is not a good place to go and some stories where ATP is good. I’ve heard ATP is Rip-off and they will take advantage of you financially. That worries me a little.
I work hard, and I’ll be making a big financial investment and i know we live in a world where advantages are taken. I do not know much about ATP regarding how they treat their students, and whether or not ATP actually cares about you and all they care about is the money.
If you guys could put yourself in my shoes, although some of you went to ATP many years ago which was different than it is now; with truth and honesty, would you really recommend ATP? I know this is ATP forum and who knows, your job may be to advertise them but this is a persons life we are speaking of.
As much as it is in the students aptitude, the school plays a significant role in the students success. Unlike any other school, I’ve never seen as much of an advertisement as I have ATP adversing themselves. Which makes me question, if the school was that good why so much advertisement? I really want to attend ATP but something about them tells me I am going to be financially taken advantage of.
First off, none of the mentors on this forum (myself included) are salesmen and we receive no incentive where you sign up or not. We were all simply where you are now, made the decision to go to ATP and are happy we did because we’re all successful airline pilots.
I have always said a) ATP is not the right school for everyone and b) not everyone can or should be a pilot. Unfortunately far too many people grew up getting participation trophies and when they fail, it’s far easier to point fingers at ATP then themselves.
The FACTS are these: ATP has successfully been training pilots for the airlines for 40yrs, has had over 25,000 grads hired by airlines over that time (over 1,100 in the last 12mos) and pioneered the airlines partnerships. As for all their advertising, ATP doesn’t employ salespeople and there are many aspiring pilots who don’t know where to start. Their advertising, while suspect to you, led you to this forum. Another thing unique to ATP (but you seem ok with this?).
Honestly just based on your post I’m not sure you should go to ATP (and no, this isn’t some kind of reverse psych sales pitch). You say you “know it is very ACCELERATED which is no problem”. Really? Have you participated in accelerated flight training before? I don’t care how smart you are or how well you’ve done in school. Flight training has physical aspects that factor in greatly. One of the #1 reasons people do fail out is overconfidence and not realizing this is a lot harder than ANYTHING they’ve ever done. Next you say “As much as it is in the students aptitude, the school plays a significant role in the students success”. While that’s true, it already sounds to me like you’re saying “I KNOW I’m not the problem…”. To that I say maybe? Spend some time on this forum and see how many confess after the first week how they had no clue how challenging it was going to be.
Bottomline is this, do your research and make your decision. You can listen to the naysayers or be another ATP success story. Your call.
I appreciate your input. When I said, it’s no problem to that it’s accelerated, I mean as in, although it’s accelerated, its possible with hard work and dedication. Yes, it’s going to be hard, and challenging. But that is not a reason for me to not go because it’s accelerated so that’s why I said it’s okay that it’s accelerated. It just means it will be hard work which at the end, allows grit, perseverance, resilience. It’s one thing be arrogant but I usually like to be confident because it’s important to get through such a training.
I asked because people often do something and like you said, they blame because it didn’t go their way. Thought I’d ask someone who’s been there and done that and understands the good and bad of the school.
Haile, the answer seems very obvious. You said you’re getting ready to choose a school, so you must have a list of potential candidates. Go visit them, talk to admins there, get a facilities tour, book a disco flight and fly with each one.
Obviously with having your private, the flight itself is hardly more than an hour towards 1500 and a fun excuse to fly, but its a great chance to check out the facility, the planes, see if they’re clean or filthy, well taken care of or beat to hell. See how strictly they adhere to checklists and procedures (I had one CFI go thru the checklists religiously, and at a different school, the CFI kicked the tires, wiggled the ailerons and stabilator, pretty much implied “it was fine on its last flight, landed and taxied here fine, so it must be ok for our flight”) See what kind of travel time you can expect to/from the practice area. Flying 10-15min each way to get to the practice area runs up the expenses quick. Most importantly, you will have a chance to have a private conversation with the CFI, and get the inside scoop on the school, their experience there, would they recommend training there, etc. And you’ll just know if the instructor cares about teaching or is just there running up his hours. And by talking to people there you’ll pick up on what kind of atmosphere exists at that school and if you can see yourself spending a lot of time and money there.
Depending how long your list is (mine was 5 schools all over eastern half of US), it might get very expensive to visit them all, but its a very worthwhile investment. Would you accept an in person job or commit to a college without first visiting, and instead just going by what some random people said on the internet? Would you buy a house sight unseen? Ofcourse not for any of those, so why rely on internet success/horror stories as your only source of information? For me, my experiences from visiting flight schools almost 100% matched what the various reviews said, but going and visiting paints a much better picture than reading a few sentences on google.
Haile, it won’t take a substantial amount of time to go through the Student Experiences part of the forum and see for yourself whether ATP is something for you or not. One of the threads there is mine and dates to a few months before my starting date in 2018. As you can gather from my thread, I have had a good experience with the training and it carried over to my training habits that I use to this day (CQ is coming up and I am back in my study mode). I have heard negative feedback about my flight school as well, and found that in the cases where I knew the background of the issue, the problems were primarily with student performance compounded by the school’s accelerated pace.
Whether or not the school is a “rip-off” may be substantiated like this: one of my friends that started training a month after me but left ATP to pursue the self-paced approach through mom-and-pop style school just earned their CFII a couple of months ago. I have been at a major airline for almost a year despite almost a year-long delay due to COVID hiring freezes. 4 year difference in a career with a limited shelf life due to mandatory retirement is well over $600k in gross earnings alone, lest we forget about things like seniority, 401k growth, etc. In our industry, even a difference of a month can mean a difference between making it to an airline or a major and getting stuck on a previous step, but that is less predictable and quantifiable.
Besides myself, I’ve encountered many other ATP grads that had the same experience as myself and have no regrets about going to ATP. I hope this helps!
While I’d love to sit here and say, “ATP is for you,” the only individual here that will be able to make that determination is when you walk to the mirror and see your reflection, it’s you. We (all the mentors) are not sales representatives, but successful pilots that took ATP’s program serious, put the work in, and made it to the airlines. I already went on a social media rant tonight on the forum, so I’ll avoid that topic.
I’ll also make the facts short and brief, ATP provides them, for anyone to see:
I recommend you take a look at our biographies section on the forum. When you walk into a hiring panel, you will see diversity. When you walk into your first day of airline training, you will see diversity. This diversity of where you train, built time, come from, all compromise the flight crew, everyone brings a bit of background with them. Everyone learns differently, some at a fast pace, some need slower, or maybe more visual than self-taught. These are things to take into consideration when doing your flight school research.
If you continue to make statements like this, you will soon believe that fully. I can say, I never felt like I was taken advantage of, in fact, I received everything that was promised when I enrolled and in return, I gave them everything that was expected of me as a student. I truly think you need to take an admissions flight at ATP, get your own personal opinion, and decide whether ATP is where you could foresee yourself training in the near future or not.
I just started ATP a month and a half ago and am happy to say I’ve gotten exactly what I expected from it (which is all good things). It is a time, life, and monetary investment, but you get exactly what you give, and it pays off. ATP is expensive, obviously. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable. All flight training is expensive, but ATP provides you with a clear-cut outline to completion, excellent resources, and instructors who’ve been where you are two years ago and need you to succeed for themselves to succeed.
The only truly out-of-your-control reason I can see for people struggling at ATP is due to them having a bad instructor, which truly can affect your experience. But every instructor at my TC has been someone I believe I would learn from, so I wouldn’t rule out ATP for this since you can have a bad instructor anywhere. And it could become a story to tell for interviews? Think about it this way, if you can believe that ATP is monetarily worth it, and you can handle the accelerated pace, then everything else at ATP is just like the aviation industry, from the bad to the good. If you don’t like it at this level, well, it could lead to some difficulty down the line.
