Training If You Are Not A U.S. Citizen

Plan on three to six weeks for the approval, and start it before you arrange time off work or book travel around a block of training. Students who apply first almost always fly on the week they intended to.

Tell us at your first enquiry that you will need it, and we will register as your training provider straight away so your side of the paperwork is the only thing left.

The approval you hold is tied to the category of training it was requested for. When you come back for an instrument rating, or move across to the twin for a multi-engine rating, that is a new category and it goes through the programme again — the same three to six weeks, on the TSA’s schedule rather than yours.

This is the part that catches people out, because nothing about the first approval suggests there will be a second. The current categories and what each one covers are published by the programme itself, so read them there before you plan a year of training around a single application. Tell us which rating is next and we will file our side of the request while you are still flying towards the one before it, so the waiting happens in the background instead of between two blocks of training.

Your passport; evidence of your lawful status or presence in the United States; contact details; your FAA certificate and medical, if you already hold them; and the TSA documents and approval that apply to the specific category of training you are doing.

The definitive list comes from the official TSA portal and the current rules, not from a marketing page — including this one. We will walk you through it on the phone before you spend anything.

The thing most people expect to disqualify them does not. A foreign passport is not a barrier to an FAA certificate, and neither is a foreign address on your documents, a licence issued somewhere else, or never having touched an aircraft before. You are checked on the same things as anyone else, plus the security approval.

Two of those checks decide it, and both are worth settling before you spend money on flying. The first is medical: you need at least a third-class FAA medical certificate, issued by an FAA-designated aviation medical examiner, before you fly solo, and a condition nobody asked about in advance is the usual reason a plan stalls. The second is the TSA approval, which the agency grants or refuses — that decision is not the school’s to make, and no school can promise you the outcome.

• Age is not one of the gates. The rules set a minimum, not a maximum — what decides it is the medical certificate, not your birthday.
• English is a proficiency requirement, not a first-language requirement, and it is tested rather than assumed.
• If you already hold a licence from your own country, bring it to the first conversation. It changes what is left to do here.

We have taken non-U.S.-citizen students through the Flight Training Security Program before, and we know the points where an application usually stalls — a document that does not match the passport, a fingerprint appointment booked too late, a category of training entered incorrectly.

Call before you start and we will go through the sequence with you, so the application goes in right the first time.

Schools built around international students usually sell a programme: one price for a fixed number of hours, an enrolment agreement signed before you arrive, and a figure that reaches well into six digits at the top of the market. What that price buys is visa sponsorship and a cohort with a start date. If you are already lawfully here and do not need either, you are paying for a structure you will not use.

There is no programme price here because there is no programme. Flying is $110 an hour with the aeroplane, the fuel and your instructor all inside that number, bought an hour at a time. Nothing on the invoice changes because your passport was issued somewhere else.

• $110 an hour, aircraft and instructor together, for every rating we teach.
• $200 for a discovery flight for one person, $300 for two or three, if you want to see the place before committing to anything.
• A private certificate typically runs $11,500–$13,000 in total, an instrument rating $8,000–$12,000. What moves those numbers is your hour count, not your nationality.
• No enrolment fee, no deposit, no international surcharge. The TSA fee you pay to the programme directly, not to us.

We fly from Sacramento McClellan Airport, ten minutes north of downtown, every day from 7 in the morning until 7 in the evening. There is no intake date and no cohort, so you book the hours you can actually fly — five days in a row while you are in California, or one evening a week around a job.

The whole school is two instructors: Denis Vyatkin, who owns it, and Sergio, who takes most beginners. You keep the same one from your first lesson to your checkride, which matters more than it sounds like it should when English is your second language and the briefing is where the learning happens. Four aircraft sit on the ramp, including a Piper Seminole, so a multi-engine rating later does not mean finding another school for it.

Denis Vyatkin, who owns the school, instructs in English and in Russian. Russian-language instruction is booked by appointment — tell us when you enquire and we will build your schedule from there.

The FAA requires English proficiency to hold a pilot certificate, and the knowledge test is in English. That does not change. What changes is how quickly a difficult concept lands when it is first explained in your own language and then practised in English.