TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Flight School's Bankruptcy Leaves Students In The Air

Tribune photo by BILLY TOWNSEND

A group of former students of the Silver State helicopter flight school in Lakeland mill around Thursday evening in the parking lot of the school at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport.

ADVERTISEMENT

By BILLY TOWNSEND | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 7, 2008

LAKELAND - Matthew Ogle has wanted to fly since he was 14.

After graduating high school, the Wesley Chapel man looked at Embry Riddle, the aviation university in Daytona Beach. But it was too expensive. Instead, just days before Ogle planned to enter community college, his father, Richard, suggested a look at the Silver State helicopter flight school in Lakeland.

At the end of its 18-month program, Ogle could be a certified flight instructor, likely with a job waiting as an instructor for the fast-growing flight training operation. It sounded so good that Richard Ogle signed up, too. A few months later, wife and mother Danitza Ogle joined the program.

Richard Ogle said the family dreamed of relocating to the Caribbean one day and flying helicopters for a living.

Now they just want to recover as much as they can of the $210,000 they borrowed for tuition and find a place to finish their training.

The Ogle family joined about 50 classmates Thursday in the parking lot of the Silver State building at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport. They came to trade information about the sudden bankruptcy that shut down their school on Monday.

Silver State Helicopters' sudden closure Sunday night left 2,700 students at its 32 U.S. flight academies wondering about their training investments and career plans.

The privately owned Las Vegas-based company said a downturn in U.S. credit markets severely curtailed the availability of student loans and resulted in a sharp and sudden downturn in new student enrollment. The company advertised its pilot instructor program at a cost of $69,900.

Chapter 7 in U.S. bankruptcy court leads to the dissolution of a corporation and sale of its assets.

"The decision to shut down operations was made only after the company explored its other available alternatives," said Elizabeth Trosper, a company spokeswoman. "Information for former employees and students will be disseminated as it becomes available."

None of the students, many of whom said they'd taken out loans to pay the $69,900 tuition, said they'd heard anything from company officials.

Tampa lawyer Gene Odom arrived to talk with the group, but he said he's not yet sure if any money can be recovered.

"We're going to look into that," Odom said. "We've got a big group of people."

Students would need to both establish liability and find some defendant with money from whom to collect, Odom said.

Many of the students and instructors at the meeting described a sort of triple financial whammy in the school closing: loss of some or most of the investment in their training; new costs in finishing training somewhere else; and the loss of instructor jobs with the company, which many of the students said they were pursuing.

The instructor jobs acted as a sort of internship for graduates of the program, who are not very marketable as pilots until they've logged 1,000 hours of flight time, several students said.

In teaching, the instructors gained valuable flight time that they could convert into non-educational civilian jobs upon reaching the 1,000-hour threshold. There were about 12 instructors for the more than 100 students of the Lakeland program.

As instructors moved on to better jobs, new students took their places. On top of that, the school was growing nationwide and perpetually in need of instructors, said James Allen.

Allen moved his family to Winter Haven from Pueblo, Colo.

"We may have to turn around and move back," he said.

Everyone interviewed for this story expressed happiness with the quality of training from Silver State, though a shortage of R-22 helicopters sometimes limited available flight time.

Lakeland's branch of Silver State opened in December 2006, meaning that only one person had made it through the program, which is calibrated to last 18 months, students said.

But a number of students from the first class are within a handful of hours of graduating.

Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at (863) 284-1409 or wtownsend@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT