moralesjosh wrote on 5/10/2014 3:47:56 AM:
| Quality of Aircraft |
3 |
|
Quality of Instruction |
1 |
| Availability of Aircraft |
2 |
Availability of Instruction |
3 |
| Cleanliness of Aircraft |
3 |
Facility Amenities |
1 |
| Community Atmosphere |
1 |
Friendliness of Staff |
3 |
| Professionalism of Staff |
1 |
Value of Training |
1 |
| Overall Score: 1.9/5 |
Employee(s) worked with: 2
Reason for visit: Flight Training
I recommend this flight school: No
Pros
Cheap |
Cons
May kill you |
My Review of Sheble Aviation:
Review - Sheble Instrument Training Course (or 10 Days in a Crazy House)
My wife and I signed up for Sheble’s 10-11 day instrument training course in early March for the purpose of acquiring our ratings in mid-April 2014. Our work schedules kept us on a hard departure date so our initial communications with Sheble addressed the need to checkride by a certain day. We were assured on schedule completion would not be a problem.
What follows is a day by day breakdown of our appallingly negative experience at Sheble Aviation. If you’re into quick and dirty here it is:
• An instructor that falls asleep on cross-country flights as readily as on a traffic filled approach at the North Las Vegas Airport
• Another instructor that took my wife on a 4.9 hour night cross-country in a C-172 with a published fuel endurance of 4.75 hours
• A ‘school’ with 6 instrument students, 2 CFII, 1.5 airplanes (two planes with one lacking the requisite equipment for instrument training) and a complete absence of organization
• An owner whose rare presence was highlighted by drinking Coors Light while having his mechanic install an engine in his race car while one of the 1.5 airplanes was down.
If you’re interested in the whole experience please read on.
We arrived in Needles the night before the course began. The accommodations at America’s Best Value Inn were suitable and for the Sheble rate of $36/night, very tolerable.
The first day consisted of signing the requisite paperwork, paying for the course and ground school. Ground school was fairly well-organized and provided a great deal of information backed up by the training packet provided on the Sheble website. What we were not provided was a syllabus or overall plan for the course. I’ll come back to this fact repeatedly as the theme of our experience was absence of organization.
I should mention at this point if you’re expecting a typical classroom, don’t. The airport has been taken over by Sheble Aviation and most of the buildings (trailers) on site belong to the school. The main building is a pre-fab home with a front desk, a simulator (more on that later) room, kitchen and a couple empty bedrooms. The ground school was held in an aged trailer adjacent to the main building and required the students gather up a mish-mash of tables and chairs. Also littered about the airport are numerous cannibalized airplanes some of which, I was told, are in the boneyard from being landed gear up. Oops.
My day two was spent studying in the office studying followed by 1.5 hours of flight training. The initial instrument flight was challenging and I was spent after bouncing around in the desert heat chasing a needle and trying to read an approach plate.
Day three and four were spent on the simulator and studying the provided materials. I also grabbed an Oral Exam Prep guide off the shelf and began studying it as well. As there were two CFII for 5-6 students, I ended up teaching myself how to use the sim and flew on my own the first couple approaches. Day four I received more formal/supervised training. It should also be said that the “state of the art ATC-710 simulator” may have been state of the art in 1999 but certainly isn’t so in this millennia. It was awkwardly slow to get set up and froze up a few times. One instructor explained the software hadn’t been upgraded in quite a while.
At this point we were four days in and I had 1.5 flight hours and 4 sim hours (my wife was doing no better). We were both concerned about achieving the 40 hours stated the course would provide. Repeatedly throughout the course we had to ask what was planned for the following day. Several times through response came as “what do you want to do?” Not exactly a confidence inspiring reply. Increasing our concern was a disturbing scheduling event. A private student’s checkride had been planned for a nearby local airport and he’d been prepping for that location. A week before the checkride the examiner informed the scheduler the ride would be out of North Las Vegas instead of the planned airport. Rather than inform the student when she was told, the scheduler waited until the night before his checkride. Thankfully he passed but it was totally unnecessary for him to be unprepared.
The morning of the 5th day we had a serious conversation with our instructor about making hours and when and where our checkride would be scheduled. He insisted we’d make hours and that he would be transparent about our checkride scheduling situation. We came to find that our checkrides had been scheduled for two days after our planned departure.
The evening of the 5th day, to ensure she was caught up on hours, the other CFII offered to take my wife for an evening flight. He did the flight planning while we grabbed dinner. They took off at 1900 and returned from the planned 3.15 hour flight at midnight. That’s five hours (4.9 on the Hobbs). They did not get fuel along the way. The Sheble provided C-172 data has a flight endurance of 4.75 hours. The instructor exceeded the legal flight time of the plane by 0.65 hours, the actual amount of usable fuel by 0.15 hours and far more importantly jeopardized my wife’s life. The kicker was that he had no idea how long they were gone. After review of the flight plan my wife determined the instructor planned the flight at 110kts. Never once during my time there did I see either 172 go above 105mph in level flight.
Then the weird things started to happen. As you may know Sheble Aviation is a family business. There was certainly no division between family and business. The ‘accountant’ (owner’s father-in-law) quit and hauled off his trailer only to show back up a couple days later. The scheduler (owner’s wife) also quit and showed up a couple days later. The scheduler then texted our instructor asking him if he thought my wife and I were swingers. As if we weren’t flattered enough the other CFII texted our instructor asking if we had an open relationship. I’ll be clear in stating that in no way were these advances invited.
By the 6th day we thought we were in an insane asylum but decided to soldier on. Admittedly, we should have ran screaming after the night flight incident but our motivation to complete the rating over powered our common sense. The next day or two passed uneventfully with long flights and conclusion of sim time. During this time our checkrides went from Bullhead City, to McCarren in the wee hours of the morning and finally to North Las Vegas. Unfortunately they could not get us completed on the same day which required I make changes to our departing flights. Something we communicated in the beginning we were nearly inflexible on.
Day 9, with the checkride finally fixed we opted to move from Needles to Vegas saving commute time and this point we’re both feeling woefully unprepared for the pending checkride. That day my wife flew approaches with the instructor at the busy North Las Vegas airport. He could not stay awake. Physically could not stay awake. I needn’t explain that in simulated instrument conditions the instructor is a safety pilot tasked with providing visual traffic input to the under-hood student. I needn’t describe the unnecessary risk this put my wife in. I needn’t expound on the added stress this put on our already bizarre experience. That evening our instructor informed us that he would be returning in the morning with a third instrument student and flying all three of us on my checkride day. At this point I am still 2.5 hours short of being legally able to fly a checkride and 5.2 hours short of the 40 hours Sheble Aviation states they will provide on the course. My cross country is somewhat planned but I’ve not gone over it with the instructor and now I’ve in essence been told there won’t be time to thoroughly review the plan with the instructor.
Finally better judgment got the best of us and we decided there was no way we were prepared for the checkride and were not willing to put another thousand dollars on the line. We informed the instructor of our decision when he arrived in the morning and departed the airport wondering what on earth happened during the preceding 10 days.
As we reflected on the experience it became very clear that Sheble Aviation, at least in its current incarnation, should not be in the business of training pilots, it should not be in the aviation business, it should not even be allowed to look at an airplane.
We have since communicated our experience with the scheduler and asked for a reasonable portion of our tuition to be refunded. She expressed concern about the illegally long flight and the sleepy instructor (a fact that was known by the Sheble scheduler) and the 10.2 hours my wife and I were missing from the stated 40. I was promised a return call that never materialized. In calling back several times I actually reached the elusive ‘Jo-Jo’ Sheble who told me, and I quote, “…I’m not up to speed on this, and nor do I need to be up to speed.” That very clearly says he doesn’t care about his poorly/dangerously/illegally/unethically run business. Up to now, I have not received a follow up call from the outfit.
If you’re considering Sheble Aviation for any kind of flight training consider very seriously your other options.