I want to commend you on your use of the extremely capable and ever-cheerful Ronald for part of your team, BUT, any future student should be given the following WARNING prior to starting their instrument training with Ron: “WARNING!! This guy will REFUSE to allow you to say you’re never gonna get it! He will NOT get annoyed with you and let you quit for the day, just because you blew the same approach six times in a row! He will continue to LAUGH every time you threaten him with physical harm, and you WILL NOT be able to persuade him to just keep the money and go on the next student!” By the time it all comes together and you start to wonder why you ever thought it was so difficult – about the eighth day for me – he will make some smart-aleck remark like “I knew you could do it all along”(!) In short, I appreciate the fact that he MADE ME do it [I had three other instrument instructors in the thirty years and 1100 hours since I got my private ticket], and would recommend Ron and AFIT to anyone – with the above warning, of course.

Your firm provides a very valuable service to the pilot community; we need more instrument rated flyers, but it’s all too easy to get discouraged in the early stages of shooting approaches and decide to “quit for now, and come back to it when I have more time, money, patience, etc…”i.e., QUIT. I tried those fly-an-hour-at-a-time-once-or-twice-a-week processes in some syllabus-oriented school’s high-time fixed-gear, fixed-prop trainer with no real success, because it was too easy to put it off. I’m convinced that your method whereby I flew my own new Bonanza off my own Class C airport – and jammed it all into ten days – has made me a much safer and more capable pilot than the old-fashioned way.
Thanks Tony.

• Ed Holliday - Laguna Niguel, California