Complaints

This profile includes complaints for Flight Gest Academy's headquarters and its corporate-owned locations. To view all corporate locations, see Find Local Branches.

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  Flight Gest Academy

  1725 E International Dr Morrisville, NC 27560-7690

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  Flight Gest Academy

  PO Box 98084 Raleigh, NC 27624-8084

The complaint text that is displayed might not represent all complaints filed with BBB. Some consumers may elect to not publish the details of their complaints, some complaints may not meet BBB's standards for publication, or BBB may display a portion of complaints when a high volume is received for a particular business.

• Initial Complaint

  Date:12/30/2024

  Type:Product Issues
  Status:

  AnsweredMore info

  Complaint statuses

  Resolved:

  The complainant verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Unresolved:

  The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith effort to resolve it.

  Answered:

  The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response, OR b) did not notify BBB as to their satisfaction.

  Unanswered:

  The business failed to respond to the dispute.

  Unpursuable:

  BBB is unable to locate the business.

   
  Complaint: 22746088
  
  I am rejecting this response because:

  FlightGest Academys response does not address the central issue here. The lack of communication between the Admissions Coordinator and Flight Instructor led the Flight Instructor not to know the scope of work the company had agreed to, so he proceeded conducting unnecessary training which led to inappropriate billing. As I indicated in discussion with their management and in the original BBB complaint, a partial refund is required for the unnecessary and not-agreed-upon training completed by FlightGest Academy. To resolve this matter, I am willing to accept a 50% refund due to the limited contribution to my sons required flight time they provided, the limited new knowledge my son gained from their instruction, the cost of fuel and the cost of work force while my son attended their school.

  
  FlightGest Academy claims that they performed an assessment and deemed my son required complete retraining, but the Flight Instructor was not aware that he was supposed to assess the student for a mock check ride and simply forced my son to work through all stages of the flight instruction checklist. FlightGest Academy claims this level of instruction was required before my son could advance to the mock check ride. However, this assertion is disproven by the fact that after we pulled my son from FlightGest Academy very early into their retraining, he went back to his previous flight school and without any additional instruction, he successfully completed both the ground mock check ride and practice flight mock check ride with his instructor. The flight mock check ride with an independent mock check ride instructor has been repeatedly rescheduled due to inclement weather;otherwise, I am confident my son would have completed this as well.

  
  FlightGest Academy put a student who has demonstrated he was ready for the mock check ride through complete retraining which conclusively demonstrates the FlightGest Academy retraining conducted and billed was unnecessary and therefore a partial refund is required.

  
  FlightGest Academy claims my son was placed in the mid-stages of our PPL syllabus but in fact, he was placed at the very beginning, Stage 1 of 5, and the Flight Instructor was making him work his way through all stages. The record of service in Flight Circle (training notes, checklists, etc.) which FlightGest Academy continues to withhold would show this.

  
  FlightGest Academy claims that there were additional hours needed before my son could have taken the mock check ride.Before starting with FlightGest Academy, my son had previously scheduled his cross-country solo flight (~3.3 hours) with his prior school and informed his FlightGest Academy Flight Instructor immediately upon starting with FlightGest Academy that for efficiency, he intended to keep that solo cross-country flight. His FlightGest Academy Flight Instructor agreed that this was acceptable. Outside of the flight instruction completed with his other flight school, my son only needed 1.3 hours of instrument flight. FlightGest Academy completed this necessary 1.3 hours, but has charged me for 6.6 hours of flight time. As noted above, the remaining 5.3 hours of flight time were not needed for my son to proceed to the mock check ride and did not help advance the student.

  
  FlightGest Academy claims that they retained a record of all trainings including documentation such as notes and checklists and charges but they have failed to provide it to me despite my request. I called and spoke with someone on their staff who informed me there were no managers present at the time, so I politely requested that they temporarily reinstate access to the Flight Circle so I could obtain just my sons records or if they were not comfortable with that, they could simply email me a copy of his records from Flight Circle. The FlightGest Academy staff said he would communicate that request to management on my behalf but I never received a call or email from them. I believe the records are being withheld from me, despite my having paid for service and being entitled to the records related to it, to prevent independent flight instruction expert review. I would note that FlightGest Academy did not provide the records related to my sons training to support their response to my complaint so I have to assume the records would not support their response; otherwise, FlightGest Academy would have been provided the records.

  
  Lastly, FlightGest Academy claims of verbally abusive and unprofessional are simply not true. I met with my sons FlightGest Academy Flight Instructor in person and then spoke with him on the phone with no issue. Similarly, I spoke with Admissions Coordinator initially and later a FlightGest Academy staff member about access to the Flight Circle records with no issue. The call with FlightGest Academys Assistant Chief Flight Instructors, Office Manager, Chief Flight Instructor, and Company President was unpleasant for them and me. One after another of FlightGest Academys management got on the phone and simply repeated almost verbatim the first sentence of the second paragraph of their response to the BBB over and over again. They acted as though their statement about the situation was beyond question because they were the flight instruction experts and I was just a parent of one of their students. I was certainly upset, but at no point in any interaction with any of FlightGest Academy's staff did I raise my voice, use profanity, call anyone derogatory names or engage in any other conduct meeting the standard of what they have alleged. One of their managers took offense to my making a different voice as I told the story of an interaction between me and a person on their staff. This was not intended to be offensive, just an easy way to communicate a conversation between two people,but they indicated they found it offensive, so I immediately stopped. 

  
  
  Sincerely,
  
  ******* *******

  have required all of that instruction. My son said he had been doing well, so this seems fabricated to justify the expense. I called and spoke with multiple levels of FlightGest Academy management who asserted the same thing even though I don't know how they would be familiar with my son's situation as I called them unsolicited and they never paused to review any documentation. When I informed them I intend to file a complaint and explore options to recover charges for inappropriate service and charges, they deleted my son's Flight Circle account which stored a record of all trainings including documentation such as notes and checklists and charges. The trainings should not have happened so there should be a partial refund and it was inappropriate conduct to create a post-hoc justification for trainings completed in error and to destroy the record of service to prevent external expert independent review. The *** certifies flight schools and a complaint has been filed with them as well.

  Business Response

  Date: 01/14/2025

  The customer reached out to us and represented to us that his son had completed all necessary training and flight hours and was ready for checkride. I spoke with him personally on the phone and stressed that we could not guarantee that we would send his son off to checkride immediately, as we hold our students to a very high standard, particularly in ground knowledge. I emphasized that there might be multiple training lessons after his son's assessment, and that we would gauge his son's knowledge and ability by doing a mock checkride for him, which is standard procedure for all of our own students before checkride. In an email, our other Admissions Coordinator stated: "As we discussed, we will need your son to come in and complete a mock checkride & possibly some proficiency flights if deficiencies are discovered," so this was communicated both verbally and by email.

  His son did not perform up to a standard where he would have passed his checkride, and the student was placed in the mid-stages of our PPL syllabus based on our assessment of his knowledge deficiencies. In addition to deficiencies in knowledge, the student had misrepresented his logbook to us, and when we looked it over when he came in, we found he did not actually have all of the legally required hours and so would not have been ready for checkride at any school. All info shared with us by the father during the initial stages of enrollment was incorrect or incomplete, and this resulted in us placing the student at a lower proficiency level than the father wanted. We believe in giving a quality education and the success of our students, and we do not send a student off to a checkride if we are confident they will need a recheck.

  There was immense pressure on the student by the father, as they had applied to colleges claiming the son already had his PPL since they expected him to have it in time. He did not have it yet, and the father was putting so much visible pressure on the student that the student was deemed too upset to fly safely on one flight. The student himself admitted to his instructor that he had deficiencies in his knowledge both for ground and flight, and he tried to tell his father that, but to no avail.

  The customer's representation that we "agreed" not to put his son through extra training is a misrepresentation, as we at no time made any such promise and repeatedly stressed the possibility of further training flights. The exact wording I'm assuming the customer is referring to when he said "email with the terms of service" is detailed above. 
  
  We at no time resorted to personal attacks on the student, as represented by the statement that the student's instructor called him a "bad student," and we repeatedly asserted we wanted to help the student reach proficiency.
  
  Regarding the complaint about a refund, we do not issue refunds when actual time was used in the aircraft and in ground instruction, and we in fact did advance the student, as we quickly and efficiently ensured he finished all his required hours. The time he flew was useful to him and we in no way violated any agreement with the customer by charging our normal hourly rates (which were shared with the student and his father prior to any training) and refusing him a refund of services rendered and delivered on.
  
  Concerning the customer's statement that "I called and spoke with multiple levels of FlightGest Academy management who asserted the same thing even though I don't know how they would be familiar with my son's situation as I called them unsolicited and they never paused to review any documentation," it should be known that the customer spoke to each of our Assistant Chief Flight Instructors, our Office Manager (Head of Student Administration/Billing), our Chief Flight Instructor, and our Company President. We all told him the same thing because we were all already aware of the situation and had all previously reviewed the student's records after the first time the customer reached out to us. The representation that we never reviewed any documentation is a blatant untruth.
  
  Regarding the claim that "When I informed them I intend to file a complaint and explore options to recover charges for inappropriate service and charges, they deleted my son's Flight Circle account which stored a record of all trainings including documentation such as notes and checklists and charges," we do not and actually cannot delete a student's account, and we have all records of payment on file. No data was destroyed at all, and we have the capability to provide the data to any official "external expert review."
  
  We were informed in no uncertain terms by the father that they were done training with us, and it is our standard procedure to archive the account of any student discontinuing training with us, which blocks the student from accessing our system. We do this because we store proprietary company information needed by actively training students on our software, so any student leaving the Academy loses access to that proprietary information as a safeguard of our information. 
  
  It should be noted that during his communications with our staff, the father was verbally abusive and thoroughly unprofessional to every staff member he talked to.