Brn N Rubr
Well-Known Member
False. The part 141 school then needs to be approved by the VA. That's not so hard of a process...just an annoying one to accomplish. This training all gets accomplished under the non-college degree side, which has a $10k/year cap. The advantage to this side is you can knock out ratings as fast as you want provided you have funding available.
Separate from that, if you got to a college with an aviation department (Institute of Higher Learning in VA vernacular), you can then qualify for about $18K/year in funding. This option goes slower, but it gets you a degree as well. I'll leave the argument of "Are aviation degrees valuable" to other threads. Suffice to say, anything which you paid $0 for certainly has some value....
This^^^^^^^
I just wrapped up my instrument (yesterday as a matter of fact) under Post 9/11 benefits. I am the schools first student to complete a rating using VA benefits so there's been a few learning experiences thrown in there but overall it's going very well. I paid out of pocket to get my private from them and plan to go through the ratings with them (hopefully they'll buy a twin).
Under the vocational side of things you get $10,000/ school year (this year is 10,300 and next year is something like 10,900). As I'm sure some of you know, the VA's "school year" is 1AUG-31JUL. So, I have a couple grand left over to start my commercial and then 1AUG the new money becomes available and I can power through that. I plan to have my CFI by the end of the year doing it this way.