This Review Overall Rating
I'll start from the beginning,
Ground school:
was very good and presentations and instructors were fantastic for the MEP and IR Prep classes. Both instructors were owners of the school so it was no surprise the quality of the instruction was top class.
We went off to do our MEP flying of 6 hours practical flying. This was quite good and no complaints from me other than we had to wait about a week for the backlog to clear up a little bit to get flying.
My only criticism of the groundschool is they don't give you good quality paper for the SOP's and training material. It should all be printed out for you waiting on your desk instead you have to mess around with settings on the computer and in Polish sometimes wondering if it will print how you want it.
BIFM: I enjoyed this a lot in the simulator and in the single engine for the real flying. Instructor was good so no complaints from me on this stage of the training.
IR Simulator: The infamous Bogdan was my instructor and mentally me and my sim partner would arrive 30 minutes - 1 hour before the lesson to lube ourselves up and get ready for a shouting session of being his punching bag whenever we made a mistake. Some days he would say A, B and C then the next day we would do A, B and C only for him to turn around and tell us that was wrong even though it's what he told us the last time.
It got to the stage where if we made a mistake we would be too afraid to own up to it and just continue and hope he doesn't see the mistake because he will shout at you either way so at least but not admitting it there was a chance he would not see the mistake and we would not get shouted at. Anytime we heard "pause simulator" we knew what was coming.
He didn't instruct much or explain a lot during the lesson he only explained stuff before the lesson if we had a question for him. I found this to be very negative training and did not enjoy my simulator time there. Despite all of this I got on well with him during the lessons mainly because I did not talk back to him and just bit my lip and did my best not to make mistakes.
Multi engine IR:
My instructor was quite old and lacking in English a little bit, he was also quite shouty but I seen he was trying his best to teach me and felt if he had better English the lessons would be a lot better. He did teach me a lot but there was always a little fear in the back of my mind he was going to shout at me as it's just his way of teaching is to get angry and frustrated sometimes which I noticed he just can not help at times. Overall he did teach me a lot but again I felt the fear of making mistakes was quite negative training in the end and this carried forward with me from the simulator.
CPL Complex:
This was fun and enjoyable, instructor was a little crazy but a character nonetheless to just watch how he acted and behaved sometimes over reacting over nothing. A nice guy though and a decent instructor.
Skills Test:
My examiner was very nice and understanding. Gave great feedback after the exam in the debriefing and this was actually the best instruction I had in all of Bartolini. It's a pity it came at the very end because if the standard of instruction was 50% of what he showed me I would have learned so much more on the training and been much better equipped for the exam.
Summary:
Bartolini has the potential to be one of the top flight training schools but ultimately it's letdown by lack of organisation and communication with students. If the owners paid more attention to what's going on with the training and put more effort into dealing with problems before they become a problem it would easily be one of the better schools around. It seems to be a very reactive organisation where problems are allowed to escalate and only when the student finds the courage to speak up they will help you.
It took me 14 weeks to complete my training, there was a massive backlog when I arrived and spent some time at the beginning stuck on the ground. They also sold a multi engine and one broke down as well needing maintenance for a long period. There was too many students for the airplanes available to finish our IR so the backlog continued and the whole duration of my training the backlog did not go away.
Communication with students is quite poor overall. Nobody keeps us in the loop unless we asked and even when asking a lot of the times there was no explanations.
Organisation is quite all over the place, some staff clearly don't want to be there and don't like their job. There is a very nice blonde receptionist who is a good communicator and actually tries to help you if you have a problem and are nice to her.
I feel like the management are not involved in the everyday running of the school with the students and are generally out of the loop with how the training goes on. They need someone that the students can go to with problems and advice because they seem to be generally quite busy with other stuff than the training.
This was just my observation with the whole situation in my 3 + months there.
Course(s) taken:
General
Aircraft
Simulators
Theoretical Training
Practical Training
