Not much in the way of arts there...

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It's political correctness gone mad!

My Uncle lives in Port Hardy and currently flies a Beaver. If you'd like, I could ask him about flight schools and which one he would recommend.

"There's really only one sexually related thing I'm good at: Producing incredibly volumous amounts of spooge on a regular basis." - ni

makes all the difference in the world.  I used to have one, but the shop closed and they moved to a location south of Austin near Buda (pronounced "bee-you-duh").  When I had my yearly BBQs, I would get my meat from that shop and it was always fantastic.  Plus they could give me chain of ownership ("chain of evidence") for each cut.  This is nice if you're interested in local grass fed beef or the like; they guarantee it came from X herd and was slaughtered on X date.

Plus it's nice to hit up a meat counter with custom requests and have them be helpful.

If your butcher / meat counter has aged beef, now's the time to try it.  It's pricey, so being single helps.
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Taken out of context I must seem so strange - Ani DiFranco

whatever you do, don't tell the instructor you don't need to learn how to land the plane..

But a school ? For commercial license ? Several co-workers took lessons at the rinky-dink little airport near my home. Seems you pay for the lesson, learn takeoff/landings (and touch-gos) then eventually get your solo certificate. Between that and ground school, you'll get your 'basic' license.

Then, after enough hours in your log book, you can start doing (training? applying?) for all the other stuff (instrument/IFR, twin engine, etc).

So what's a school buy you that the local airport lessons wont ?

Me being USian, and you being Canuckistanian, I won't be able to advise very well about how your licensing works, and not being local, I don't know anything about those schools in particular, but I can advise on how to go about picking an instructor, I suppose.

Here in the US, we have two types of flight schools, called Part 61 and Part 141. Part 141 schools are more structured and operate under an FAA-approved curriculum, while part 61 schools are less regulated -- you work to your instructor's curriculum. Either can be good, part 141 tends to be more consistent. Find out if you have a similar setup in Canada, so you know basically what varieties of school you're considering.

The best way to pick from your list, I think, is to visit each school, and you can learn a lot from just keeping your eyes open in the facility. Call ahead and set up an appointment to talk to an instructor; this can include an intro flight if you like, and an intro flight gives you a chance to eyeball the airplanes too.

• Is the scheduling process itself painless and professional? If you leave a message, does it get returned reasonably quickly?

• Does the instructor turn up on time for your appointment? If this introductory meeting gets misscheduled, or they forgot to tell the instructor, or the instructor overslept, or the instructor is running very late with a previous lesson and no one called you to change your time of arrival, or if they forgot to schedule a plane for the intro flight portion, etc., you can expect more of the same during your course of training.

• Does your instructor come across as a knowledgeable professional? Does he have materials for you to take home, hopefully at least some sort of outline of costs involved for the average student? Could you stand to learn from this guy/gal in close quarters for many hours at a time? Is he able to clearly answer the questions you ask now? His job is to communicate information to you, so how is he doing with that?

• Find out how much experience your instructor has, and if possible find out what the other instructors' backgrounds are as well. You'd like to personally work with someone who has some experience, perhaps several months as a full-time instructor.

  You'd also like to work with someone who plans to be around for a while; it's no fun to get a few lessons in, and have your instructor depart for a bigger and better job, and start with another instructor, and have him do the same thing, etc. So, what is the instructor turnover like?

  If you are looking at a fairly 'green' instructor, remember that what this person lacks in experience he may make up for in enthusiasm, plus he's probably going to be working there for a while before he's ready to move on. You do want to see some sort of checkpoint or mentoring system where newer instructors are working with an older instructor, and where you occasionally have stage checks or something similar with a chief pilot or senior instructor.

• Are the facilities and planes clean? Does everything seem to be well-maintained? In the airplanes you are shown, is there 'a place for everything and everything in its place'? Are there a lot of 'inop' stickers in evidence (things the flight school has chosen to mark inoperative rather than fix). A clean airplane is probably a well-maintained airplane; it is at least a cared-for airplane.

• Is there an on-site mechanic? An on-site or dedicated mechanic will probably mean less downtime when something does go wrong with an airplane.

• How many planes are there? Ask to see the scheduling system they use. Is the schedule extremely booked or overbooked, or are there some openings for the day you visit or the next day for airplanes and instructors? When the schedule is always tightly stacked, this is a sign of success I suppose, but it also means you may have difficulty getting planes and instructor availability in the times you're available, and you may find that as the day wears on the schedule slips more and more as people return progressively later from each lesson.

• Is the airport a busy, congested airport? Is there a control tower? If so, ask your instructor about what local, non-towered, non-congested airports he also likes to use. If your airport is nontowered and quiet, ask the coverse; where do you go, and how often, to get familiar with flying in a busy environment? As a pilot you will be operating in all sorts of environments, and you want to be comfortable in them.

  Your home airport also influences your training costs to some extent; if you're based at a very congested airport, you will burn more clock time sitting on the ground waiting to take off than you would at a quiet airport.

I'm sure I'll think of more; if I do, I'll post more comments.

^{Getting more attention than you since 1998.}