Encino Flight Training, Straight Up Balboa Blvd
If you live in Encino, our address is your street: leave Ventura Boulevard heading north on Balboa and you reach the hangar door without turning once.
Same street, four and a half miles north
Encino has the simplest route to a flight school of anywhere in Los Angeles. Balboa Boulevard runs through the middle of the neighborhood, crosses Ventura, climbs through the Sepulveda Basin past Lake Balboa and the Japanese Garden, and arrives at the western fence of Van Nuys Airport. Our door is at 7900 Balboa. There is no freeway decision, no canyon crossing and no mountain pass involved anywhere in it. You already drive part of this same road to buy groceries.
You have also been watching this airport your whole time here without necessarily registering it. The aircraft that pass over Encino most mornings are Van Nuys traffic, and the ones descending across the Sepulveda Basin are lining up on the runway you would learn on. The Balboa Golf Course, Woodley Park and the flood-control dam sit directly beneath that flow. What is background noise from a garden in Encino Hills turns out to be an approach path with your name available on it.
Encino also produces a particular kind of student. Family households, established careers, people who spent twenty years planning to do this and are now looking at a calendar that finally has room. A large number arrive as two people rather than one, because a discovery flight here is close enough that a partner or a teenager comes along without it becoming a day trip. That proximity is the reason people in this neighborhood tend to actually finish what they start.
Springs are the reason Encino exists at all. Los Encinos State Historic Park still has the pond and the de la Ossa Adobe that made this a stopping point on the road north, and from the air that little green rectangle off Ventura Boulevard is startlingly clear against the surrounding blocks. Learning to fly here means learning to read your own neighborhood from above, which is a genuinely different relationship with a place you thought you already knew.
Where Encino families usually start
Six options, from an afternoon with your daughter to a certificate on the wall.
Standard Private Pilot
The full FAA Private Pilot Certificate. Where most students start.
Learn morePremium Private Pilot
The widest margin of hours for students who want no surprises.
Learn moreInstrument Rating
The rating that makes a licence useful in Southern California weather.
Learn moreTry it first — a discovery flight from Van Nuys
You fly the aircraft from the left seat with an instructor beside you. The time is loggable and counts toward a certificate.
Luxury Cirrus For Two
The SR22 Turbo, glass cockpit. 90 min $549, 120 min $699.
Learn moreRedbird Simulator Session
FAA-approved full-motion MCX, on the field at Van Nuys.
Learn moreEncino to 7900 Balboa Blvd, Suite 108A
From Ventura Boulevard, turn north onto Balboa and stay on it. You cross the 101, then Burbank Boulevard, then run up the west side of the Sepulveda Basin with Lake Balboa and the golf course to your right and the wildlife reserve on your left. Past Victory the airport fence begins. We are at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, Suite 108A. Four and a half miles, twelve to fifteen minutes, and precisely one turn in the whole journey.
From Encino Hills, come down White Oak, Hayvenhurst or Encino Avenue to Ventura and join Balboa there. Only two things ever slow this route: the Balboa and Ventura junction at school run time, and the basin road when a weekend event fills Woodley Park. Neither adds more than ten minutes. There is no reason to touch the 405 or the 101 in either direction, which spares you the two least predictable stretches of road in the Valley.
Parking is free, on site, outside the door. No structure, no ticket, no attendant, no walk from a distant lot. Because the drive is short and parking is instant, an Encino student can do a full lesson inside a two-hour window and be back for the afternoon. That single fact, more than anything in a brochure, is why students from this neighborhood tend to fly twice a week and finish on schedule.
Why the airport on your street is the right one
Distance is what finishes certificates
The most common reason people abandon flight training is not cost or nerve; it is friction. A forty-minute drive turns a one-hour lesson into half a day, and half-days are the first thing a busy household cancels. Four and a half miles removes that excuse entirely. Encino students fly more often, which means they need fewer hours overall.
Two runways and an active tower
Van Nuys is one of the busiest general aviation airports anywhere, with two parallel runways and controllers working light aircraft all day. You learn to talk on a live frequency and slot into a sequence from the very first lessons. It is a harder place to start and a much easier place to have started from.
Everything under one roof
Cessna 162, Diamond DA20, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Cirrus SR22 Turbo, Piper Seminole and a Redbird MCX simulator. Discovery flight through to a multi-engine rating without changing schools. For a family that may end up with two or three people training at different levels, that consolidation is worth a great deal.
Open when families are free
Nine in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week. Saturday morning lessons, Sunday afternoon lessons and post-work evening slots are all standard bookings rather than special arrangements. Encino calendars are usually built around other people's schedules, and a school that closes at five is simply not usable.
The aircraft on the ramp at 7900 Balboa
Training begins in a Cessna 162 Skycatcher, a Piper Warrior or a Diamond DA20, and your package covers the aircraft and the instructor as one thing. These are deliberately simple aircraft, and they give you immediate, unfiltered feedback on what your hands and feet are doing, which is exactly what a student needs and exactly what a heavier, more forgiving aircraft would hide. Because there are several of each, an unscheduled inspection does not become a lost fortnight. Almost every first solo out of this hangar happens in one of the three.
From there the fleet steps up. The Piper Arrow II brings retractable gear and a constant-speed propeller, the complex time a commercial certificate requires. The Cirrus SR22 Turbo has a glass cockpit and a whole-airframe parachute, and the twin-engine Piper Seminole is where the $5,100 Multi-Engine Rating is flown. The Redbird MCX full-motion simulator rounds it out at $189 for a sixty-minute session, and it is where the emergencies get practiced properly, on the ground, in whatever weather you like, as many times over as it takes to make them boring.
Encino seen from the air
Four things you can pick out within two minutes of leaving the runway.
Lake Balboa and the Japanese Garden
The lake sits just north of Encino with the geometric garden and the reclamation plant beside it, and the whole basin is unmistakable from the air. You fly over it on the way to almost every practice area.
The Sepulveda Dam
The long concrete arc across the basin that most Encino residents drive past without ever quite seeing. From above the scale is obvious, and it is one of the standard visual references for arriving at Van Nuys from the south.
Los Encinos State Historic Park
The spring-fed pond and the adobe off Ventura Boulevard that gave the neighborhood its name. From 2,500 feet it is a small deep-green patch that stands out sharply against the surrounding grid.
The Encino Reservoir
Tucked into the hills above Mulholland, hidden from every street in Encino and completely open from the air. Most students see it properly for the first time on a lesson, despite having lived below it for years.
Common questions
Four and a half miles from Ventura and Balboa, and it is the same street the whole way. Twelve to fifteen minutes in normal traffic. You go north on Balboa across the 101 and through the Sepulveda Basin, and the airport is on your left after Victory. It is the shortest run to a flight school of any neighborhood we serve.
No, and that is the point. The route is entirely on Balboa Boulevard. Encino Hills residents come down White Oak, Hayvenhurst or Encino Avenue to Ventura first. The only regular delays are the school run at Ventura and Balboa, and weekend events at Woodley Park. Neither costs you more than ten minutes.
Yes. Free, on site, in our own lot right outside Suite 108A at 7900 Balboa Boulevard. There is no structure, no meter and no walk from a remote lot. Combined with the short drive it means a one-hour lesson genuinely takes about two hours out of your day, start to finish.
The Standard program is $10,900, Comprehensive is $15,900 and Premium is $22,500. The higher tiers buy more instructor availability, more Redbird simulator hours and more tolerance for a disrupted schedule. Financing is available through Stratus Financial alongside our own in-house payment plans, and the initial in-person consultation costs nothing.
Yes. The Teen Flight Training Package is $4,200. A student can fly solo at sixteen and hold a private pilot certificate at seventeen, which for most families means a license to fly arrives before a license to drive a friend home. After-school and weekend slots work well given how close Encino is to the field.
It does. The flight time is loggable and applies to the hours required for your certificate. Discovery Flight For One starts at $229 and For Two at $299 for sixty minutes. If you enroll in a program within 24 hours, 100 percent of what you paid comes off the price of that program.
Almost certainly, and sooner than you expect. Departures and practice areas from Van Nuys take you across the Sepulveda Basin and along the south side of the Valley, which puts most of Encino under the wing regularly. Students routinely spot Los Encinos park, the reservoir in the hills and their own street within the first few lessons.
Two to three lessons a week is the pace that works. At that rate most people finish a private certificate in four to six months and need fewer total hours, because nothing has time to go stale between flights. Flying once every couple of weeks costs more in the end. Living four miles away makes the faster cadence genuinely realistic.
One turn from Ventura Boulevard
Come and see the aircraft before you commit to anything; the consultation is free and takes thirty minutes. Call (818) 290-8249 or book a discovery flight from $229, and you will be looking down at Lake Balboa within a few minutes of takeoff.