After a multi year search for a world class pilot training site, Wright Flyers has signed a long term lease to train our pilots at the former USAF pilot training facility on the Hondo Municipal Airport (KHDO). The company will move to KHDO by March 31st.

Our 32,000 square foot building offers our customers and employees more than twice the space they had in the past. In addition, KHDO has 5 runways, nearby open skies to practice maneuvers and less traffic than our previous locations. These advantages, along with Hondo's low cost of living and close proximity to San Antonio, the 7th largest city in the USA, means our customers will get the best training quality and value available anywhere.

If you have questions, or would like more information please contact Marc Silva: marc@wrightflyers.com or 830-387-3144.

Wright Flyers added the flight school industry's latest flight simulation trainer to its fleet last July. The Redbird FMX is a high-quality, feature-rich motion AATD with standard features that are anything but standard. With wrap-around visuals, a fully enclosed cockpit, reconfigurable construction, and of course a motion platform, the FMX serves up a level of realism that is simply unavailable in other training devices on the market.

The demand for new pilots allows many beginning students to go from zero time to the right seat of a regional jet in a couple of years. But any pilot with designs on flying for a major airline will need a four-year degree, and to make that easier, Wright Flyers Academy and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University have formed a partnership to give students who earn their ratings at Wright Flyers 36 credit hours toward a degree. In essence, that could take about a year off a four-year degree program at ERAU, not to mention a sizeable savings in tuition.

Wright Flyers Academy has trained future airline pilots in the San Antonio area for nearly 30 years, and in 2007 earned the Cessna Aircraft Company’s prestigious Platinum Award. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace. For 8 consecutive years ERAU has earned the top spot in the annual “America’s Best Colleges” guide published by U.S. News & World Report magazine in the category of “Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering” programs. For more information, please call Marc Silva, Wright Flyers’ Manager of Pilot Services at 210-820-3800, or send him an email.

The Skycatcher will feature a Garmin G300 avionics system. Information is presented in a single, split-screen primary flight display (PFD) and multi-function display (MFD), or as two full-screen displays with an optional second screen. The aircraft will be capable of day and night, visual flight rules (VFR) operations. Preliminary design parameters for the SkyCatcher include a maximum gross weight of 1,320 pounds, a service ceiling of 15,500 feet, a useful load of 490 pounds and a usable fuel capacity of 24 gallons. It has a cabin width at shoulder height of more than 44 inches, equaling that of the much-larger, 6-place Cessna 206 Stationair. It features two top-hinged cabin entry doors and forward pivoting seats giving access to a 12.5 cubic-foot baggage compartment. The aircraft will have tricycle landing gear with a castering nose wheel and standard dual toe-actuated disc brakes.

Our latest class of students has joined our Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) approved Chinese Airline Pilot Training Program. Wright Flyers has trained more than 100 Chinese pilots since it was certified by the CAAC in 2006.

This new class of students will join future airline pilots from the United States, and more than twenty other countries, who have selected Wright Flyers Academy for their professional training.

It's one of those things that's been intuitively accepted -- glass cockpit technology improves situational awareness, thereby enhancing safety. Now a study published this week by the AOPA Air Safety Foundation (ASF) confirms that technologically advanced aircraft (TAA) are involved in fewer accidents when compared with the overall general aviation fleet. The analysis shows that advanced aircraft account for 2.8 percent of the GA fleet, but were involved in only 1.5 percent of the accidents. Most notable was the difference in accidents related to fuel. TAA have fuel-monitoring and warning systems, and there was not a single fuel-related accident reported in the ASF study. In other GA aircraft, fuel-management accidents occur at a rate of almost three per week.