***So Christine might have been the lowest paid of those who were paid! To my knowledge none of the brothers took paychecks, nor did dad.***
More than $10 million dollars was funneled from ATA to Discover Air including $3 million+ in outstanding debt at the time of closure. This is sworn grand jury testimony. The brothers got paychecks from Discover which was so heavily subsidized by student tuitions from ATA that it couldn't have existed without the flight school. I'd say that counts for a paycheck.
***What I am sick of is people perpetuating the outright lie that the Williams' ran off with a bunch of money. They didn't. There was no money! The creditors took it, and so did most of the employees, as pretty much everyone but contractors got paid the last day.
I don't deny your claims about Discover. That was a very poorly run operation and may indeed have been the prime cause for the business failure.***
So basically, they did run off with the $$, only instead of putting it on offshore accounts, they invested so much of it into a failed airline that had no bearing on the flight school operations that neither could remain afloat. Hey, they were the owners .... they need to fess up and take responsibility for what happened. NOBODY had more to do with ATA being gone than the Williams family. Nowhere in the literature was it made public to potential or currently enrolled students that their tuitions would be used to support Discover. It was poor and very questionable management decisions that caused both to go belly up. Plain and simple.
***ATA had a shot at being something great if they could have found some staying power. The quality of instruction was far superior to any other school I have seen so far. Any time you get people like Dave Gwinn, Scott Sindelar and Jeff Froehlich teaching you about RJs you are doing pretty darn good. The combined total of RJ flight hours in that trio is well over 20,000 hrs.***
Agree. Instructors and staff were great. Students were dedicated with diverse and well focuses personalities.
***And you are incorrect about disappearing without a "post it note" as you say. There was a large meeting for all employees and contractors in the big class room where David told us the story and what was happening. I think they did more than their attorneys advised them in fact! Consider that the doors were open all day Thursday and several students were able to get their personnel files. I've seen schools shut down before and you usually show up to find a padlocked door and no people.***
Students got no formal notificaiton. I hold the not so prestigious honor of flying the last flight and in fact landed the Aztec after the doors were locked to find students crying in the parking lot, mechanics urging me to take the Aztec to Umatilla and leave it there, and Ruth in her Cadillac telling the press that "that had seen this coming for a long time." I saw students show up after I landed, flight bag in hand, ready to go on their flight. Four students were to have checkrides the next day. Students found out either by word of mouth, by watching the news, or by showing up to find the gates locked. Very classy move.
***That ScrewedbyATA.org website was a huge mistake if you ask me. It made many of you look like whining cry babys. It was not well thought out.***
Agree some people put their foot in their mouth but given the circumstances, students as a whole were not going to simply pack their bags and head home. 95%+ of the students were not from Orlando .... uprooted their families, moved, locked into apartment leases or home mortgages.
***In summary, I am with you on the debt issue. It is sad and tragic that several students are now stuck with tons of thousands of dollars of debt. That part really sucks, too.***
I really hope you meant several HUNDRED students, not just several. Christi can give the exact number but I believe there were just under 400 enrolled students on 2/27 ... a few, maybe 30 (myself included), were at the end of the ASII program and had technically gotten the most out of their tuition payment. Most of the student body was in ASI including at least a dozen (not four) students that had started in February alone. Only a handful of students paid in cash. The rest paid in the form of a student loan and well over 300 are in a position where greater than $10,000 of training was not received.
***It was a lose - lose situation.***
Yeah, I agree on that one.