So there I was, a scant few weeks ago. I’d just found out that I was going to be given the gift of flight school, and satisfy a longtime dream/goal of mine. Of course, the afterglow of that revelation quickly gave way to decision-making time. Before I could train, well, clearly I had to decide where to train. What airport? What school? How would I weasel this all around my work schedule?
First things first… where to go? The Atlanta area has a fair number of airports to choose from. The choice of convenience was clearly KPDK, a scant five miles or so from home. It offered a wide variety of schools, along with a busy “trial-by-fire” environment. Another possibility was KLZU in Lawrenceville. On the plus side, it was a lot quieter than PDK. On the other hand, it was roughly 25 miles from home; worse yet, in the opposite direction from my office. Since I expected to be flying before/after work at least some of the time, that was a bit of a hit, since I’d probably need nearly an hour to get between LZU and the office. Still another option was KFTY, on the west side of town. Probably convenient from the office, but a decent drive from home for those weekend flights.
After agonizing, I eventually decided that PDK was going to be my default choice and where I would start looking. I figured that even though the busy nature might be intimidating at first, in the long run it would be good to get used to that from the start. So I looked through the list of flight schools out there. I made a conscious decision to avoid the schools which seemed to cater to people going for a career track. Eventually, I narrowed it down to two quasi-finalists: Advanced Aviation and PDK Flight Academy.
Advanced Aviation caught my eye right off the bat, since they operated with Diamond aircraft. I had flown a Cessna 152 on a discovery flight several years ago, and so had some familiarity with it, but it’s pretty hard to deny that the DA20 is sort of sexy looking for a trainer. That’s probably not the best criteria for choosing a trainer aircraft, but gut feelings are hard to deny. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to see that both plane rental and instructor rates at Advanced beat out PDKFA. I decided to drop by the school the next day to see about setting up a discovery flight.
The next afternoon, I arrived at PDK, hunted down the Advanced office, and spent some time talking to Lana, one of the instructors. Just some general chit-chat about what I wanted to do, etc., etc. Eventually we got me on the schedule to fly at 5:00 Monday afternoon with another instructor named Scott. I headed home, feeling palpable excitement.
Things changed almost immediately. Upon arriving home, I saw that I’d missed a call en route. Scott had left me a voicemail… seems that Lana accidentally scheduled me in the DA40 instead of the DA20, and the DA20 was already reserved for Monday afternoon. After some discussion, we rescheduled my discovery flight for 8:00 Monday morning instead.
Finally, I was making some progress in picking a school. I had only 12 hours to go before I’d have my first DA20 experience!
