I’ve always been intrigued by accelerated flight training courses that promise to add on the next rating or certificate in a fixed number of days for a set price. Maybe it’s because the concept is so far removed from how I learned to fly back in the 1980s. At the local grass strip where I first started taking flying lessons as a teenager, scheduling two or three flights a week seemed like a lot. Now I was being offered the chance to fly two or three times a day and knock out my commercial multiengine ticket in less than a week. With a written proposal from Pan Am International Flight Academy in Miami for a packed schedule that would involve more than 20 hours of flying and a ton of learning, I packed my bags and headed to south Florida in mid-February. This was going to be a blast, I thought to myself.
Although I was excited, I also had my doubts about whether I could really master everything I needed to learn in such a short amount of time — especially after I arrived in Miami and was greeted by low overcast and drizzle. The weather cleared, but other hurdles made completing my training on time a challenge.
