American Flyers

A national training brand operating since 1939, with a Scottsdale location. Structured, long-established, and priced like a professional academy.

5.07 Google reviews

  • Discovery flights
  • Career track

Scottsdale · KSDL · Website · 480-939-3997

What you can train for at American Flyers

  • Discovery flight

    20–30 minutes · you fly

    $99–250 typical Arizona price

    The trial lesson. You sit in the left seat and actually fly, with an instructor beside you. Most schools credit it toward training if you carry on.

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  • Private pilot certificate

    60–75 hours in practice

    $13,000–20,000 industry range, all in

    The licence that lets you carry passengers. The FAA minimum is 40 hours; almost nobody finishes in 40, which is why quotes built on it come in low.

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  • Instrument rating

    added after the private

    $10,000–15,000 on top of the private

    Flying by reference to instruments, in cloud and at night with real dispatch reliability. The rating that turns a licence into transport.

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  • Commercial pilot certificate

    250 hours Part 61 · 190 Part 141

    $10,000–20,000+ advanced training only

    The certificate you need to be paid to fly. Counted from zero, the full career track runs $80,000–120,000 and is normally financed.

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Those are the honest industry ranges, not this school’s rate card — no Arizona school we checked publishes one. Ring us and we will get you their actual number, at their price, with nothing added for coming through us.

Where it flies from

Scottsdale Airport (KSDL)

The marker is the airport, not the school’s front door. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors — open the full map.

Contact and the practical facts

Airport
Scottsdale Airport (KSDL)
Founded
1939 — one of the oldest flight training brands in the US
Structure
National multi-location academy with a standardized curriculum
Address
Scottsdale Airport, Scottsdale, AZ

Who are American Flyers, really?

American Flyers has been training pilots since 1939, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating flight training brands in the United States. Its Scottsdale location is one of several across the country, running the same standardized curriculum the brand has refined for over eight decades rather than an instructor's individual approach.

That longevity shows up in the public record: this is a well-reviewed, polished operation, not a fixer-upper. What you are choosing when you choose American Flyers over a smaller Scottsdale-area independent is a national brand's structure and consistency over a single owner-operator's personal attention — a real trade-off, not a strictly better or worse one.

What is it good at?

  • Eighty-plus years of continuous operation — a track record almost no independent school in Arizona can match.
  • A standardized, national curriculum, which typically means consistent training quality regardless of which instructor you draw.
  • A genuinely strong public reputation as of July 2026, across a modest but clean review base.
  • Multiple locations nationally, useful if you relocate mid-training and want continuity with the same training organization.

What should you go in knowing?

  • The review sample size, while positive, is still small — worth reading the actual reviews rather than the star average alone.
  • National-brand pricing generally runs closer to a professional academy than to a budget independent school; confirm current rates directly.
  • As a franchise-style national brand, expect a more standardized, less personally-flexible training relationship than a single-owner school.

What do the public reviews say?

Google shows a 5.0 rating across 7 reviews (checked July 2026). We show that as plain text rather than dressing it up as our own rating, because we did not collect it and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

American Flyers is not currently a partner school, so there is no booking button here — just their own number and their own website, unchanged. We list every Arizona school we can verify, partner or not. Are you this school? Here is what partnering looks like.

See all flight schools in Scottsdale · Every school in Arizona

Contact us now

Tell us what you are after and we will tell you honestly whether American Flyers is your best fit or whether something else in Arizona suits you better. Then we book it. You pay the school directly, at the school's own price.

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