Flight training

Our conversation is all about becoming a pilot while you're enlisted in the military.

There are a lot of people around that I've met that are struggling with how to find a flight school, how to find resources, what to do to be successful.

able to have this job that requires so much time, but also pursue a career that you really want to.

And Gino makes it happen in spades.

It takes strategy on the ground and a lifetime of learning.

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Learn how to go from good to great, from flight school to regional to major, and from hopeful to hired.

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I, there was always this idea in the back of my head that I had to have some passion, some, some thing that I was always aspiring to.

And so I started looking around and I was like, I'm going to go to flight school and try to become a pilot.

What? I didn't know that.

So yeah, I went down to Macon, Georgia, spent two years down there at Herbert Smart Airport working on my commercial pilot license.

But the first week I was there, a student and instructor crashed a plane, died there.

And so...

You know, that was how I started flight school.

But I was just like, you know, accidents like that are, you know, one in a million.

You have you.

your instructor, and your flight school, okay? So you're the one that's responsible for your success.

You have to care more than anybody else because this is your life.

Some teachers always tell their, especially in high school, they always tell their students, I got my degree.

So don't ignore a red flag that your instructor has.

But before you call your instructor out on their red flag, make sure that it's not a you problem because it could be a you problem.

Then your flight school, of course, because the instructor can only do so much because the instructor works for the school.

So the instructor has to follow the school's rules.

the more I looked at land, it's like, well, it's lower, um, cash amounts needed to make higher returns.

So at that point, I'm like, "Let's jump in." Jumped into flight school and started doing deals and working towards that.

And it was... it's been a slow and consistent process for me.

And it's slowly grown over time.

Be a lot of flights.

[laughs]

No, LaShauna, there's not 100,000 people in flight school.

This is a very small niche.

Ken Gee flipped that.

He's a former Deloitte CPA that bought a flight school four months before 9/11, and today his company, KRI Partners, owns apartments all over Florida.

And in most cases, he's not the highest bidder.

In this episode, you'll learn why he raises the money before he finds the deal, the $500 move that got Florida broker to take a guy from Cleveland seriously, and why being comfortable is the most dangerous place to be.

And so after a while, I thought, "You know what? I, I like this thing.

I like this process.

I love flying." So I bought the flight school, [chuckles] right? Uh, they were flying one brand-new airplane and a whole bunch of old airplanes, and I thought, "This is not how this is supposed to work.

Nobody wants to fly an airplane with shag carpet in it." I mean, they just don't, right? So we replaced all the airplanes, bought all brand-new airplanes, grew it to three locations, became a certified Part 141 pilot school, which is how we got to be part of the Delta connection.

Yeah.

So progressing from there, uh, did you then join the 85 Combat Flying School after that?

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was a, a wake-up call 'cause you get your wings and you think, "Wow, I'm a pilot." Uh, [laughs] you get to Langebaan and you realize, "Oh, no, I'm not a pilot yet." [laughs] Um, because on the Harvards they teach you to fly, and then you go to 85, uh, Flying School, where they teach you to fight.

Um, so you learn everything from close formation to battle formation, low-level flying, um- And everything that's, uh, all the f- the, the facets that you would like to use in your, uh, fighter pilot career.

Uh, I flew mostly the Loach.

Matter of fact, the Loach is the love of my life, and the Loach and I have a 26-year history that began when I first heard about it when I was still in flight school.

It was brand new.

It broke 26 world's records, and that's like a sports car of helicopters.

I'm an Army brat, born at Army Hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, started elementary school in Germany, started junior high school in Alabama, started high school in Korea, and graduated from high school in Pennsylvania.

So flying over there was just great because every day was an adventure.

Keeping a little context here, I went into the Army in the High School to Flight School program.

So I went right out of high school into the Army.

level? Sorry, somebody with some experience.

Say a pilot from... from a flight school that's got 500 hours and is coming into the airline.

Now the job at a flight school is completely different from a corporate aviation department or from an airline low cost carrier or a major carrier.

So can you just talk about perhaps the differences and what you would expect in some of those roles?

So we're talking about somebody as a flight instructor, right? Okay, so 500 hours having flight instruction experience.

So this is why I started this consulting business.

Oh, and the other big issue that I see, I see a lot of people wanting to be pilots, And they have no idea where to start.

So they type in how to become a pilot and guess what comes up? A shiny flight school with a brochure promising certainty.