Coast Flight Training

Highly motivated staff that is going to do what it takes to get you to your goal.
Will, personally took it upon him self to make sure I was taken care. This has still left an impact on me that an owner of a business over seeing a high volume of students, fulfilling his thoughts and ideas in the school, and can still take time to meet with me personally.
Coast never took no for an answer when it came to launching there VA program when a couple schools said they were ready for the challenge and backed out last minute. They ended up making it happen and they’re still growing!
A top of the line fleet with top of the line instructors that are going to make sure you are trained safely, properly, and in a comfortable fashion.
How does an airplane fly? With cash. This is the place to spend it.
The time I was there I felt like this was the hub for networking. With out a doubt if you put in the effort, Coast is going to get you where you want to go and further.

I’m writing this review as a previous student who went through Coast Flight Training’s private pilot program (Part 61). Flying is something I thoroughly enjoy and went into Coast wanting to get my private pilot’s license to further the hobby. Just this past Friday, I received my private pilot certificate after passing my checkride with the FAA. The education and hands-​on training I received while at Coast was unparalleled to any other flight school in the area that I researched.
I decided to train in one of their Piper Archer III’s with my instructor for the course being Jordan. Jordan was a great instructor, both in the air and on the ground. He has an uncanny ability to convey his knowledge about flying as well as the material out of the book, which is what makes him such an able instructor. One neat part about Coast is that while I did 99% of my training with Jordan, I was able to schedule flight lessons with the other instructors, like Kristen and Dustin on his days off, which sometimes helped give a different perspective or teaching method to various training concepts. Every single instructor at Coast is not only an awesome pilot, but an extremely professional and competent teacher. I would not have hesitated to go through the program with any of their instructors had I not been paired up with Jordan.
One of the best parts about Coast (compared to stories I heard from friends of mine going through PPL training in various other parts of the country) is their rigidity. The training to get to where I am today was extremely challenging and they will expect your absolute best. When you consider the fact that your training in a field like this can literally mean the difference between life and death, it makes sense. I hit a few roadblocks that required me to buckle down and really get into the nitty-​gritty in areas I wasn’t excelling at, both in the airplane and out of the textbook. At times, it was frustrating, but nothing brought more gratitude than the willingness of the entire training team to dedicate their days to helping you, the student, succeed.
By the end of the course, the anxiety I felt going into my checkride subsided significantly. It went from a feeling of «I have no idea how I am going to do this» to «I’m ready to pass with flying colors». The syllabus really is designed to make you go into that checkride with a sense of real confidence because the depth in which Coast tests actually went much deeper than the checkride itself. Again, it felt really reassuring to be «overprepared».
All in all, if you’re looking for a flight school and don’t just want to be a pilot — but a very well trained, safe, and able pilot — then this is the best school in San Diego. Even though I do not plan on going commercial, I feel the training prepared me for me to be that caliber of a pilot. As far as a new private pilot is concerned, I am extremely comfortable flying solo and now taking passengers on many journeys to come. I look forward to my future in general aviation and can thank Coast for giving me a strong foundation upon which I can build and further any additional training I so choose.
PS — I cannot think of a SINGLE staff member at Coast to say something poorly about (except Ronnie, keep your eyes on him). Just kidding, love you Ronnie. Will, the owner, is an extremely personable and friendly guy as well. You will see him in and out of the facilities, but he won’t hesitate to stop and talk to you about your training, your progress, or any issues you might have. All of the ladies that work the front desk are amazing as well. Shoutouts to Amanda, Alex, and Caitlin — y’all are great. Before I ramble too much, just know that every single employee at Coast is there to help you in any way possible. Success is the end goal, and they all want to see it happen. I’m going to miss Coast!

Review for a single «discovery» flight only: I’m a student pilot from Buffalo, NY and was driving through San Diego and wanted to rent a plane and take an aerial scope of the area.
I searched on Unilocal and Coast Flight Training came up, I gave them a call at 1pm that day to see if they had any availability for a flight later that day. Lucky me — they had a holiday special going on where for $ 99 you get a one-​hour flight with an instructor in a Warrior (or $ 149 for an hour in a Cirrus). I made an appointment for 4pm that same day.
We arrived at the airport 5 minutes before 4pm and the flight instructor (Jordan) was waiting, while the receptionist took care of some minor paperwork and my wife and I helped ourselves to a cup of coffee. We made a quick plan for the flight: we would try to enter Class B airspace and fly through the bay adjacent to the downtown area right along the water.
We then went to the field and I pre-​flighted the plane. It was a 2000 Piper Archer II — a beautiful airplane in remarkable condition. I’m used to flying a ’72 Cherokee locally, so you can imagine this plane was like night and day. Traffic alerts, cylinder head temperatures, no ignition key (everything was done with switches up above); I was totally geeking out with how smooth the plane flew in comparison to what I’m used to.
Jordan (the instructor) was very personable and did well to gauge my workload and let me fly the plane. When I needed an extra challenge, he threw extra tasks at me and when I was feeling overwhelmed he would take the radio and let me concentrate on aviating. My wife was also in the backseat taking photos and videos and got some wonderful shots of San Diego and the coastline. Our original plan to head toward the downtown area was foiled when we weren’t cleared to enter Class B VFR, but we headed North up the coast and enjoyed spectacular views while doing a few touch and go’s.
It was a perfect experience. If I lived locally, I wouldn’t hesitate to give Coast Flight Training a shot for Cirrus training (which they specialize in) or to get my instrument rating.

Went to San Diego for a vacation and decided to take an into flight with Coast. I have flown in a Cessna a few times, but as I am more financially secure, I wanted to step up and fly a Cirrus. We had a great weather day (almost every day). I was lucky to have the most competent friendly instructor I have ever met. Kristen is tiny, but boy is there a lot of skill and knowledge there. She took me flying over the city, pointing out different landmarks and showing off her beautiful plane. It ended too quickly, but I now know why learning to fly in a Cirrus is worth the $$$. Great school, Great plane, Fantastic instructor. What a professional. Thanks all. Fly Safe.

Was in town for vacation and wanted to keep my flying skills from going rusty. Kristen was my instructor. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. She was not only an incredible pilot, but also a skilled and patient teacher. In my experience the two don’t usually go together.
My experience at Coast was very satisfying. Even though I only took 2 lessons there, I learned an incredible amount,
Thanks Coast and Kristen!

Being a San Diego young executive, finding time to complete my private pilot license was challenging to say the least. I had been through 3 flight schools, 4 – 5 instructors in 3 years and acquired over 80 hours of flight time.
After meeting Will, he crafted a plan that enabled me to finish my private pilot license in one week. The most amazing part, he recommended a completely different school which blew my mind and earned my trust!
At the time, Coast did not offer an ‘accelerated’ finish up course in the plane I was most familiar, a wonderful plane which was older than me, a 1974 Cessna with steam guages! Will said it made more sense (dollars and cents) to finish up in the aircraft I was most familiar with.
You should consultant with Coast before you invest another dime in your education & safety — he is guaranteed to put you and your family first. He has gained my trust, and lifelong business.

This has been an extremely hard and long review to write, and I hope that it will shed some light on the training practices used at this school.
I started at Coast around March 2013 with 0 hours, I wanted (and still want) to finish off all my ratings up to CFI (certified flight instructor). I did an intro flight with them months earlier, and after touring some other flight schools, liked that the offices were updated and professional with really awesome flight pictures from their students’ trips, and that Will (the owner & a master CFI) seemed to be very accessible and willing to take on some pretty awesome flight projects. The syllabus also seemed to be more in line with what I had envisioned: instead of taking repetitive flights locally, it was more interested in doing scenario based long distance flights in order to simulate real-​world flying. The fleet was made up of fairly new Cirrus SR-​20s and an SR-​22.
Unfortunately, things started off on the wrong foot. Instead of the long distance flights, I ended up in the pattern at Brown Field for my first 40 or so flight hours. I did learn a lot about flying in those 40 hours; however, it was completely not within what I was hoping to do. When my 1^st check ride came around the Chief CFI just waved everything off as being fine, even though I was sure that it wasn’t. My confidence was further shaken when I had a runway incident at takeoff at KMYF during a solo flight shortly after the check ride. I can laugh about it now (I’ve heard just about every ‘asian girl driving’ joke in the world now) but it scared me from flying for quite some time.
I was placed with a new instructor and finally got to do those long-​distance flights I was promised in the beginning. Things were going swimmingly and I was finally starting to have fun on my trips until said instructor took a much better paying position elsewhere, and from then on it went mostly downhill. I had a hodgepodge of brand new instructors who, I honestly felt, couldn’t find their way from an airplane to their own a$$ and were completely not worth the $ 65−75/hr. There were also huge management changes brewing in the background, and they were adding planes to their fleet that were even older and had more airframe time than their current ones. It seemed super backwards. Will, the owner, now had satellite office and no longer was involved with day-​to-​day operations (one of the main points for me attending Coast because it made it seem like they were very grounded with their students). The new general manager was pretty awesome though so it seemed like a fair trade off at the time.
Towards the end of my stay there, there were more and more people in management and less and less actual CFIs. I started to not know or recognize staff members because they were burgeoning in numbers. Paperwork for flying was increasing, solo forms used to be a single page, and now they were 4 – 5 pages long, and sometimes inconsistent from one day to the other & mostly repetitive.
Anyway, at the end of my stay, I finally got an awesome instructor (their first female one, too! which was really awesome for me) but I felt like as a student pilot with over 130 flight hours I was just an embarrassment to their school. She often got scheduled off my flights and into other ones, even though I was pretty much at my end of course. I got sick of everything at this school and, from a previous instructor during the hodgepodge stage, managed to develop a fear of stalls. The thought of going to school made me sick, and my instructor often fought to keep on my flights. Unfortunately, I had finally had it, and just never returned.
Finally–
If you think I am the only one with high hours and no certificate, I am not. My husband started roughly at the same time I did, has over 200+ hours and over $ 100k in the school and still does not have all his reqs to take the FAA practical exam (something that I at least have).
Foreign Students– BEWARE. The f-​student coordinator, Denise, seems intent on working herself out of a job by trying to kick all foreign students out through various means. I myself am not a foreign student but it’s pretty clear that she has initiated an atmosphere of fear.
I am sure management will have a different version of events, but the things they cannot refute and have even acknowledged to me in the past are that I had indeed been placed with a couple incredibly inept flight instructors. Unfortunately for me, that is time and money I have wasted and cannot get back.
Also, I guess I was enough of an embarrassment that when I pulled my deposit, no one even asked why or anything. I suppose the management just wants to book in more new students instead of focusing on keeping their old ones.
TL;DR: After $ 50k, 140+ flight hours, and over a year, I have no ratings and have developed a fear of flying. Mostly a miserable experience.

Thank you for the excellent Cirrus Transition Flight training experience! Once I completed private pilot re-​certification in early 2013 (35 years after receiving my FAA private pilots license), I looked seriously into the next step on my aviation journey. I perused; Flying, AOPA, Plane & Pilot, Sport Aviation and Flight Training magazines and read numerous articles! I went to seminars, spoke with many in the aviation community and several mentioned Cirrus Aircraft! The avionics, technology and the integrated parachute system. I then inquired about transition training, called and spoke with Will Dryden, President & Founder of Coast Flight Training in San Diego!
Although two hours drive from Los Angeles, I visited their offices, examined the clean, regularly serviced and well-​equipped training aircraft, the high quality simulator, the overall environment and was highly impressed! They informed me of the process toward my goal, I ordered the training kit and began! The scenario based training was outstanding and not just repetitive and boring loops around the airport flight pattern. Looking back on the process, I can honestly say that it was well worth the time, effort and cost whereas I feel that I am not only a more proficient pilot, I have proudly added «Coast Flight» trained «Cirrus Pilot» to my list of credentials! Discover the freedom known only to a select few! Call & Schedule an Introductory Flight with Coast and you’ll see for yourself!
Best Regards,
Pastor Kenneth Earl

I waited a long time to come on here and post a review of this school. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just influenced by my experience there at the time. Just over a year later, I still feel the same way about my time training there so I feel I can post about it now. First off, very nice school. Very nice facility. Very nice planes. Will, the owner, is extremely friendly. Bit pricey, but I knew that going in. But the reason for dropping 2 stars has to do completely with my instructor. Young guy and out of respect I’m not going to put his name on here. He was often late showing up to my lessons. 5, maybe 10 minutes doesn’t seem like the end of the world, but when the plane is booked for a certain amount of time, you want to make sure that you get to use it and not have to rush back because someone else has it reserved after you. Granted he would call me when he would be running late, but it was still bothersome. The thing that really upset me though was something he said one day while we were flying. One week, he was showing me how to stall and recover the airplane. Took me a few tries to get the hang of it but by the end of the lesson, I felt pretty comfortable. Fast forward to the following weekend and after flying up the coast and performing a few other maneuvers, he asks me to show him slow flight, stall and recovery. I stop and think about it, and I begin to set the plane up. Somewhere along the line I forget a step and ask him to help me out. He says to me, «I’ve already shown you this before, I shouldn’t have to show you again.» I’m sorry. I don’t have a plane at my disposal ²⁴⁄₇ to practice all these things. I can’t throw my car in to slow flight and stall it just to keep practicing between lessons. I can’t walk through it like when I learned a new martial art technique to keep practicing, where the only thing I needed was to have my feet on the ground. I love flying, but sadly I lost a bit of interest because of this instructor. I stuck with him for a few more weeks, until one day he called me to say he was really ill, and that he’d call me when he was better. He never did call me back, and I’m kinda glad.

Great school. They are really on top of it. I just got to my first solo flight and it was great! The planes are new and instructors are great! Really happy to be flying.

Used a groupon for taking a one hour flying lesson and all I can say is wow. The instructor knew what he was doing, I did ten years in the airforce and worked as an aircraft maint technician so I already knew instruments and such. They really go the extra mile in order to make sure you know what needs to happen before and during take off and landing. My landing was decent, wish I could have had more tries. The plane I flew was brand spanking new with top notch integrated avionics and a built in parachute. If only I had more money to get my license: /