Nine miles of surface street separate Devonshire from our door, which makes Chatsworth one of the very few neighborhoods where a flight lesson costs less time than a gym class.
Chatsworth sits in the far northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, hard up against the Simi Hills, and the sandstone at Stoney Point marks where the flat ground stops. There is no airport out here. The nearest runway of any consequence is ours, about nine miles southeast, and you get to it without touching a freeway. Very few places in Los Angeles County can say that. Most people spend longer driving to a decent gym than a Chatsworth resident spends driving to a flight lesson.
This is also a neighborhood with unusual technical literacy. The industrial strip along Nordhoff, Plummer and De Soto has held aerospace and defense work for decades, and up in the hills above town the old Santa Susana Field Laboratory tested rocket engines for the Apollo program. Enough Chatsworth households contain someone who reads a systems diagram for a living that our instructors have learned to skip the reassurance and go straight to the numbers. It is a good way to teach.
That background changes what students want. People who calibrate instruments for a living do not want to be told flying is magical; they want the syllabus, the hour requirements, the checkride standards and the honest cost. So: forty hours is the legal minimum for a private certificate and roughly sixty to seventy is what most people actually need. The Standard Private Pilot program is $10,900. Nothing about that is hidden behind a consultation, though the consultation is free if you want it.
The flying out of the northwest end of the field also happens to be the interesting kind. The practice areas over the Simi Hills and the Santa Susana Pass start almost immediately after departure, which means terrain, ridge lift, mechanical turbulence off the pass and real density altitude in August. You learn mountain awareness because it is unavoidable, not as an optional endorsement later. For a Chatsworth student the training environment is quite literally the view from the back window.
Our Courses
Ten programs flown out of Van Nuys Airport, with real pricing on every one. Start with an hour at the controls, or go straight through to airline-hireable qualifications — it is the same ladder either way.
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Start Here
The first hour at the controls, over Los Angeles, with an instructor beside you. It is the entry point to every course below — and the cheapest way to find out whether flying is actually for you.
From$229
Open 9 AM–9 PM, Seven Days · (818) 290-8249
CertificateMost Popular
The one most people mean by “learn to fly.” Fly with an instructor, fly alone, then carry passengers on your own certificate.
Fly With An Instructor Fly Solo Carry Passengers $10,900 Enroll Now
Youth Program
Ages 10–15. For young people who want to start before they can legally solo.
$4,200 View Course
Milestone
Enough training to take an aircraft around the pattern alone. The day everything changes.
$5,500 View Course
Certificate
A real certificate with fewer hours and narrower privileges. The shortest honest route to flying yourself.
$8,400 View Course
Bundle
Private Pilot with flight time, ground instruction and study materials bundled into one price.
$15,900 View CourseBundle
The same certificate as Private, with the most flight time before your checkride. Eighty logged hours, ground instruction and materials, all in one price.
80 Logged Hours Ground School Included Materials Included $22,500 View Course
Rating
The rating after Private. Turns a fair-weather pilot into a useful one who can file, launch and land in cloud.
$11,700 View Course
Rating
For pilots already certificated who are adding a twin. Trained in our own Piper Seminole.
$5,100 View Course
Our Fleet
Diamond DA20, Cessna 162, Piper Arrow II and our Piper Seminole twin — all on the field at Van Nuys.
View The FleetThe Full Route
Zero experience to airline-hireable qualifications, in one continuous program rather than nine separate ones. Financing is available, and every hour of it is flown out of Van Nuys.
$89,000Financing Available
Free In-Person Tour Before You Commit
Book It Or Gift It
Every discovery flight below can be booked for yourself in the next few minutes, or bought as a gift certificate that is emailed within minutes and never expires. Same flight, same price, either way.
Most Given
One person, one instructor, and no audience. Hands on the controls from the left seat, briefed before you go and debriefed after you land.
Hands-On Stick TimePre-Flight BriefingLoggable Flight Time
Flight Length
$229Book Or Gift
Same Price
Two Seats
The same flight with a passenger in the back seat, briefed and on the intercom. Couples book it; so do parents who would rather watch than hear about it.
One Passenger SeatPiper Warrior Or ArcherHeadsets For Both
Flight Length
$299Book Or Gift
Same Price
The Nice One
The nicest airplane we put a first-time flyer in. Glass cockpit, air conditioning, leather seats, and a parachute built into the airframe rather than strapped to the person.
Turbocharged Cirrus SR22Air ConditioningWhole-Airframe Parachute
Flight Length
$499Book Or Gift
Same Price
Twin Engine
Two engines, and the airplane instrument-rated pilots move into when they start thinking about a career. Flown from the left seat with a multi-engine instructor.
Piper Seminole TwinMulti-Engine DepartureCareer-Track Instructor
Flight Length
$499Book Or Gift
Same Price
Gift It issues a real gift certificate, emailed within minutes, which never expires and credits in full toward training. Flights are limited to 180 lb per person, 370 lb combined. Questions: (818) 290-8249, 9 AM–9 PM, seven days.
Take Devonshire Street east from Topanga Canyon Boulevard, through Northridge, until you reach Balboa Boulevard. Turn south. Balboa carries you straight down past the 118, past Nordhoff and Roscoe, and the west boundary of Van Nuys Airport appears on your left. We are at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, Suite 108A. Roughly nine miles, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the only variable is the lights. Nordhoff and Plummer work equally well if Devonshire is backed up.
The freeway version, the 118 east and then the 405 south, exists and is usually worse. You trade steady progress for the Ronald Reagan interchange and a stretch of the 405 that does not reward optimism. The one time it helps is a Sunday morning. Otherwise, treat surface streets as the default here. It is one of the genuine advantages of living at this end of the Valley: your route to the airport does not depend on a freeway behaving.
At our end, parking is free and sits directly outside Suite 108A in our own lot. No structure, no meter, no gate arm. That reliability compounds: if the drive is twenty minutes and parking takes none, a one-hour lesson genuinely costs you two hours of your day, and you can fit one before a shift on Plummer or after one. For a first visit, call (818) 290-8249 from Balboa and someone will bring you through.
The Simi Hills and the Santa Susana Pass sit at the edge of the practice area, four minutes from the runway. Ridge crossings, rotor off the pass, summer density altitude and canyon wind become ordinary skills rather than a special course. Pilots trained over flat farmland have to go and find this later, and usually pay for the trip.
Van Nuys handles a very large volume of light aircraft on two parallel runways. You learn to read a sequence, hold short cleanly and get a clearance right the first time because there is no room to fumble. Radio confidence is the single most common thing missing from pilots who trained somewhere quiet.
Cessna 162, Diamond DA20, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Cirrus SR22 Turbo, Piper Seminole and a Redbird MCX simulator, all on the same ramp. You can go from a first lesson to a multi-engine rating without ever changing schools, procedures or paperwork, and rent afterward from the aircraft you already know.
The aerospace and defense employers around Chatsworth run project deadlines and irregular hours. We are open nine in the morning until nine at night, every day including weekends, so lessons at seven in the evening or eight on a Sunday are ordinary bookings. That is what keeps two flights a week achievable when a program slips.
The trainers are a Cessna 162 Skycatcher, a Piper Warrior and a Diamond DA20, and a training package covers the aircraft and the instructor as one thing rather than two. Light aircraft with modest wing loading, which is to say they tell you honestly what your hands are doing. There is enough of each that a scheduled inspection does not cancel your week, and that redundancy matters more to a training timeline than any single feature on a spec sheet. Your first solo will be flown in one of these, most likely from the western runway.
The complex and high-performance end runs to a Piper Arrow II, with retractable gear and a constant-speed propeller for the complex time a commercial certificate requires, and then to the Cirrus SR22 Turbo and the twin-engine Piper Seminole, which is where the $5,100 Multi-Engine Rating is flown. The Redbird MCX full-motion simulator is usually the piece a Chatsworth engineer appreciates most, because it offers exactly what a test rig offers: repeatable failures, resettable conditions, and instrument approaches flown ten times over in a single hour without burning a drop of fuel.
Four features that anchor the northwest corner of the Valley from the air.
The pale sandstone outcrop beside Topanga Canyon Boulevard where generations of climbers learned to climb. From above it looks like something dropped onto the valley floor, and it is the fastest way to fix your position over Chatsworth.
Drained after the 1971 earthquake and now a fenced open space, it reads from the air as a large pale bowl surrounded by suburbs. Nothing else in the west Valley has that shape or that emptiness.
The old stagecoach route climbing out of Chatsworth toward Simi Valley, with the Metrolink line vanishing into the hillside beneath it. The pass is also the gap you use as a visual gate heading northwest out of the practice area.
High in the Simi Hills above Chatsworth, the graded platforms where Rocketdyne test-fired engines for the Apollo program are still cut into the ridge. They are close to invisible from the ground and unmistakable from the air.
Fifteen to twenty minutes for about nine miles, and none of it needs a freeway. Devonshire, Nordhoff or Plummer east to Balboa Boulevard, then south to 7900 Balboa. The 118 and 405 combination is available and is usually slower. Chatsworth has one of the shortest airport commutes of any neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Not really. There is no airfield in the northwest Valley itself, and the small fields further east add drive time without adding runway or fleet. Van Nuys gives you two parallel runways, a full-time tower and seven aircraft types on one ramp, nine miles from Devonshire.
Standard is $10,900, Comprehensive is $15,900 and Premium is $22,500, the difference being instructor availability, simulator hours and built-in contingency. If you only want to reach first solo, the Solo Certificate is $5,500. Stratus Financial provides financing and we run in-house payment plans. The in-person consultation is free and involves no pressure.
The FAA minimum for a private certificate is 40 hours. Realistically most students need 60 to 70 to reach checkride standard. Flying two or three times a week keeps that number down, because you spend less of each lesson recovering skills you already had. Flying once a fortnight pushes it up.
A good number of our Chatsworth students work along the Nordhoff and De Soto corridor. We fly from 9am to 9pm seven days a week, so an evening lesson after a shift or a weekend morning block both work. When a project consumes six weeks, a $189 sixty-minute session in the Redbird MCX keeps your instrument skills alive for far less than an aircraft would.
If you already hold a private or commercial certificate, the Multi-Engine Rating is $5,100 and typically takes about ten days of concentrated flying in the Piper Seminole. It covers Vmc, asymmetric handling and single-engine performance planning. For anyone heading toward professional flying it is close to compulsory, and the shortest meaningful thing you can add.
Mostly the practice areas over the Simi Hills and the Santa Susana Pass, which sit directly northwest of the field and therefore directly over your part of the Valley. Expect terrain work, ridge crossings and real summer density altitude. Most Chatsworth students find their own street inside the first two or three lessons and never quite get over it.
Yes, and from the same ramp. Bring your certificate, your logbook and your medical, and an instructor will fly a checkout with you in the type you want. We do not publish a rate card here, because what we sell are packages rather than blocks of flying time, so ring (818) 290-8249 and the desk at Suite 108A will tell you what is free and on what terms. Because you trained in these aircraft, checkouts are straightforward.
Drive Devonshire east, turn south on Balboa, and you are here in under twenty minutes with nothing to pay for parking. Call (818) 290-8249 to book a free consultation or a discovery flight from $229, and we will show you the ramp before you decide anything.
The three private pilot packages, what each one includes, the financing options and a realistic timeline built around how often you can actually fly. Sent to you in one email. Nobody will pressure you.
Loved On Google
Every review below is real and shown verbatim, in the reviewer’s own words — written by the people who learned to fly here, not by us.
SAFETY FIRST
Very safety and detail oriented. Pre-flight briefing explained everything there was. To my knowledge, this flight school is exceptional in their ability.
DISCOVERY FLIGHT
I recently had the chance to take my first-ever discovery flight, and it was nothing short of amazing! From the moment I stepped into the cockpit, the...
SUNSET CIRRUS
It was a great flight! I did a sunset flight and Alex let us fly an awesome. Website was easy to book, and the plane itself was really fun to fly...
FLYING LESSON
We had a great flying lesson with Ralph and came away with a much better understanding of both the aircraft and the principles of flight. Ralph is a...
KIDS LUXURY FLIGHT
I got 2 luxury discovery flights for my kids. I wanted them to have the experience of flying. Our instructor Alex was amazing he made sure they feel...
HONEYMOON SURPRISE
Last minute booking to surprise my wife on our honeymoon. She had no experience with flying and was scared of flying, but Alex was very easygoing and knew...
FULL-MOTION SIM
Amazing flight school in van nuys airport. I have been a student here for the past few months and i could not be happier. I started doing a lot of...
DISCOVERY FOR TWO
I booked a Discovery Flight for Two for my girlfriend's birthday and it was the perfect gift for her. She couldn't have been more excited to get to...
SIMULATORS
Very professional and great airplanes. I love the flight simulators. The pricing is very fair compared to any other flight school
TEEN FIRST LESSON
We gifted our teenage son his first flying lesson. He was so excited! Alex greeted us and gave a reassuring brief that made us all feel comfortable and at...
FIRST-TIME FLYER
Flying is my husband's hobby and I was incredibly anxious and apprehensive about the discovery flight. However, I felt completely safe and at ease once we...
SAFETY FIRST
Very safety and detail oriented. Pre-flight briefing explained everything there was. To my knowledge, this flight school is exceptional in their ability.
DISCOVERY FLIGHT
I recently had the chance to take my first-ever discovery flight, and it was nothing short of amazing! From the moment I stepped into the cockpit, the...
SUNSET CIRRUS
It was a great flight! I did a sunset flight and Alex let us fly an awesome. Website was easy to book, and the plane itself was really fun to fly...
FLYING LESSON
We had a great flying lesson with Ralph and came away with a much better understanding of both the aircraft and the principles of flight. Ralph is a...
KIDS LUXURY FLIGHT
I got 2 luxury discovery flights for my kids. I wanted them to have the experience of flying. Our instructor Alex was amazing he made sure they feel...
HONEYMOON SURPRISE
Last minute booking to surprise my wife on our honeymoon. She had no experience with flying and was scared of flying, but Alex was very easygoing and knew...
FULL-MOTION SIM
Amazing flight school in van nuys airport. I have been a student here for the past few months and i could not be happier. I started doing a lot of...
DISCOVERY FOR TWO
I booked a Discovery Flight for Two for my girlfriend's birthday and it was the perfect gift for her. She couldn't have been more excited to get to...
SIMULATORS
Very professional and great airplanes. I love the flight simulators. The pricing is very fair compared to any other flight school
TEEN FIRST LESSON
We gifted our teenage son his first flying lesson. He was so excited! Alex greeted us and gave a reassuring brief that made us all feel comfortable and at...
FIRST-TIME FLYER
Flying is my husband's hobby and I was incredibly anxious and apprehensive about the discovery flight. However, I felt completely safe and at ease once we...
Reviews shown verbatim, exactly as each reviewer published them.
Aviation News
Notes from the flight line at Van Nuys — weather, regulation changes, checkride questions and the cost of training, written up as they come.
Open 7 days · 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM
Los Angeles Flight School
