Canadian Flight Trainers and Pilot Training CA are both online ground school providers for pilots in Canada. We compare the two in real time and make a decision as to who is better and why. Read on to learn more.
Online Ground School Offerings
Canadian Flight Trainers
Canadian Flight Trainers started offering services in late 2018 to individual students in the Toronto area. Since then, it has grown to offer ground school services across Canada for the most important topics in aviation. CFT offers a Private Pilot Ground School, Commercial Pilot Ground School, PSTAR Preparation Course, and ROC-A exam services. Their course offerings are appropriate for most pilots in Canada simply wanting to earn the important ratings.
Pilot Training.CA
The online company PT.CA offers a lot more courses for a wide variety of students. From gliders, to airline pilots, they have a lot of options. Read on and learn why quantity does not always mean quality.
Price
Both ground schools are priced within the same range. Therefore, the price comparison is negligble.
Content
Canadian Flight Trainers
Canadian Flight Trainers offers all of the required material that is listed on the PPL and CPL exam study guides. However, they go above and beyond with the practical content required for both courses. For example, in the CPL ground school course, there is listed bonus content on practical topics related to commercial pilots in Canada like threat and error management, icing, and more human factors topics. This additional content is attributed to the experience of the instructors at the company.
The content is reported as thorough and in-depth to the point that is appropriate for each level.
Pilot Training CA
Pilot training.CA does a good job of providing a painstaking and exhausting amount of content. Feedback from students online supports this and the company is often quoted to have way too much. In an effort to provide all of the content possible, PilotTraining.CA has succumbed to the content fallacy in pedagogy; this means that they think if they lecture more content, that you will learn it. But learning doesn’t work like that, at all!
The excessive content that they put into their ground schools suggests they may be trying to compensate for short comings in other areas.
Design
Canadian Flight Trainers
The courses with Canadian Flight Trainers are constructively aligned using modern pedagogy. The course designs were supervised and approved under the supervision of university professors which teach at the Masters and PhD levels of education. In all aspects, it is the smoothest linear and free design on the market.
Pilot Training CA
PilotTraining.CA provides topics and lessons simply based on fulfilling exam requirements.
Pedagogy
Before we compare the pedagogy of each ground school provider, we must first define what it is. Oxford defines pedagogy as “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.”
Canadian Flight Trainers
As we just saw, Canadian Flight Trainers has created constructively aligned courses. To the average pilot learning, this may not mean much. To an educator, it is a huge deal. It means that you won’t be taught one thing, and tested on something completely different (as an example). It means that learning is purposeful and towards a higher goal.
These higher goals are pretty evident when you look at the content and videos. Training isn’t just towards flight test or ground standards, they try and help students become good pilots with sound judgement. If they can do that, students will easily pass exams and ace their flight tests.
In addition to this, Canadian Flight Trainers has quite a responsive team who works behind the scenes to support students. They have a live chat feature which allows students to talk to an instructor-on-call whenever they are available.
Pilot Training CA
They have proudly maintained outdated aviation material because Transport Canada hasn’t updated their exams yet. You have to ask yourself, are they teaching you anything practical, or are they teaching you to pass an exam? In aviation, this is known as “playing the game.” But when it comes down to teaching students, ground school providers should be using up-to-date material to teach future generations, not outdated material.
Videos
Canadian Flight Trainers
Daniel often goes on some very good tangents about the state of the flight training industry. He is able to practically articulate concepts and back up the theory based on real life experiences. In addition, Canadian Flight Trainers tries incredibly hard to not reuse any videos between courses. This is due to the disposition in education, or how material is approached for different students. You cannot teach a Private Pilot the same way as you can teach a Commercial Pilot. Hence, different videos on the same topic.
Pilot Training CA
One topic which is a big complaint among all PT.CA students are the videos. Although Aaron does a great job and is very well spoken, the videos are almost identical for the most part between the PPL/CPL courses. Reading a lot of feedback online, and you’ll always hear stories of students watching the videos at 1.5x the normal speed just to make the ground school bare-able. We don’t think it should be like that.
Instructors
Canadian Flight Trainers
Daniel has been teaching at all levels of aviation. From the recreational pilot to the 25 year seniority Airbus A330 pilots in Canada. His experience overseas as a survey pilot, as a Captain with Air Canada Express, and Instructor on the A330 serves Canadian Flight Trainers extremely well across the courses they offer.
Pilot Training CA
Aaron is a well respected career flight instructor in Canada. His easy explanations suit a majority of the videos very well. Our only criticism is his experience. We were unable to determine if Aaron had any experience at the higher levels of aviation, like any airline flying. Although the content is very theoretical, we found it very inappropriate for Harv’s Air to ask Aaron to teach content which is beyond his practical experience level.
Overall
We think that overall, Canadian Flight Trainers does the best in the courses that they teach. From their focus to better online delivery and student support, to the experience behind the instructing team, the choice is fairly clear for students who want to learn to earn their Private Pilot License or their Commercial Pilot License.
