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.
Van Nuys Airport · KVNY
Northridge Flight School, Twelve Minutes Down Balboa
You have been hearing our traffic on final approach over Devonshire your whole life; the ramp it is heading for is Van Nuys Airport, four and a half miles from your house.
5.0★100+ reviews on Google
4.5 mifrom Nordhoff and Balboa
$4,200teen flight training package
2,000+first flights flown safely
Local
The Airport You Already Live Underneath
Northridge sits directly under the arrival path. Van Nuys usually lands to the south, which means the aircraft you hear crossing Devonshire and Nordhoff in the late afternoon are not passing overhead at all: they are three miles out, gear down, configured, about ninety seconds from the runway. People here grow up with that noise as background. What almost nobody realizes is how short the drive is to the other end of it. From most of Northridge the flight line is four to five miles, and the trip takes twelve minutes at midday.
That proximity changes the economics of learning to fly more than anything else on this page. Flight training rewards frequency, badly and expensively. Two lessons a week and you finish near the forty-hour minimum; one lesson a fortnight and you pay for the same twenty minutes of revision at the start of every flight until the total creeps past seventy. A twelve-minute drive is the difference, because it makes a Thursday evening lesson a normal thing to do rather than a small expedition you have to talk yourself into.
Cal State Northridge is the other reason this page exists. There are around forty thousand students on the campus at Nordhoff and Zelzah, plus faculty, plus the enormous number of graduates who never left the neighborhood. A decent share of the people who walk in here holding questions about the airline program are engineering or business students who have worked out that a professional pilot career is a costed, financeable thing rather than a fantasy. We run through the numbers with them for free and we do not pretend the timeline is shorter than it is.
The rest of the students from Northridge are much what you would expect from the neighborhood: nurses and technicians from the hospital on Roscoe, teachers, retail managers from the Fashion Center, retired people with time and a long-standing interest, and teenagers whose parents finally decided the money was better spent here than on another year of something they had lost interest in. A first flight is $229. It is a real lesson, logged in your own name, and the hour counts toward a certificate whenever you start one.
Courses & Pricing
Every Course We Teach
★★★★★
5.0 Rating
100+ Google Reviews
Course prices are packages, not hourly rates - the aircraft, your instructor, ground school and simulator time are all in the figure. Van Nuys Airport, KVNY. Financing Available Through Stratus & In-House Plans.
Start Here
Discovery Flight
The First Hour At The Controls. Credited Toward Your Training If You Enroll Within 24 Hours Of Landing.
From$229
Book A Discovery Flight
01
Discovery Flight
The first hour at the controls; credits toward training if you enroll within 24 hours of landing.
From$229
02
Teen Flight Training Ages 10–15
Starting before it is legal to solo.
$4,200
03
Multi-Engine Rating
For existing pilots adding a twin.
$5,100
04
Solo Certificate
Enough training to take an aircraft around the pattern alone.
$5,500
05
Sport Pilot
A real certificate, fewer hours, narrower privileges.
$8,400
06
Private Pilot Most Enrolled
The one most people mean by “learn to fly.”
$10,900
07
Instrument Rating
Turns a fair-weather pilot into a useful one.
$11,700
08
Comprehensive Private Pilot
Private with flight time, ground instruction and materials bundled.
$15,900
09
Premium Private Pilot
The most flight time before your checkride - 80 logged hours.
$22,500
10
Airline Pilot Program
Zero experience to airline-hireable qualifications.
$89,000
All Prices In USD. 7900 Balboa Blvd, Suite 108A, Van Nuys, CA 91406 · Open 9 AM–9 PM, Seven Days. Free In-Person Tour Of The School
Book It Or Gift It
Fly It Yourself, Or Give The Flight To Someone Else
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
Two Seats
The Nice One
Twin Engine
Discovery Flight For One
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 It Or Gift It
Same Price Either Way
Discovery Flight For Two
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 It Or Gift It
Same Price Either Way
Luxury Discovery Flight
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
Bring A PassengerInstructor + 2 is our maximum+$100
$499Book It Or Gift It
Same Price Either Way
Multi-Engine Seminole
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 It Or Gift It
Same Price Either Way
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.
Getting Here
Northridge To 7900 Balboa Blvd
If you are anywhere east of Reseda Boulevard, take Balboa south. From Devonshire it is four and a half miles through Granada Hills and past Nordhoff, Roscoe and Sherman Way, and the airport perimeter appears on your left just before Saticoy. Suite 108A is on the 7900 block with our own car park in front of it. Twelve minutes on a normal midday run, sixteen at half past five when Nordhoff and Roscoe are both busy. There is no freeway involved at any point.
From the west side of Northridge, around Tampa or Corbin, Reseda Boulevard south to Sherman Way and then east is the cleaner run, and it avoids the campus entirely. That matters more than it sounds around class changes at Cal State Northridge, when Nordhoff between Reseda and Zelzah can take a genuinely silly amount of time. Coming from the Fashion Center, Plummer east to Balboa and straight down is the version most of our students from that end of town settle on.
Everything about arriving is deliberately dull. Parking is free and it is our own lot, so there is no structure, no barrier and nobody to pay. Walk in through the door of Suite 108A about fifteen minutes before your slot, bring photo identification the first time, and wear shoes you can push rudder pedals in. Headsets and charts are ours. If you cannot see the entrance from Balboa, ring (818) 290-8249 from the kerb and somebody will come out.
Why Van Nuys
Why Train At Van Nuys Rather Than Further Out
1
Frequency Is The Whole Game
The single strongest predictor of what a certificate costs is how often you fly. Living four miles away lets you book two lessons a week and keep them, which is what holds the total near the minimum hours. Students who drive forty minutes each way average one lesson a week within a couple of months, whatever they intended at the start.
2
A Tower, And The Radio Work That Comes With It
Van Nuys is controlled, busy and has two parallel runways, so you learn clearances and sequencing from the first lesson instead of discovering them at a strange airport two years later. Northridge students already know the traffic pattern by ear. Learning to be part of it, with a controller talking to you, is a different and far more useful thing.
3
Terrain And Coastline Within Twenty Minutes
North of you the Santa Susanas give real terrain and mountain flying, and twenty minutes the other way is open coast. Cross-country training runs out of Van Nuys to Camarillo, Santa Paula, Santa Barbara and Palmdale, all easy legs from our ramp. You will not spend paid aircraft time repositioning to find somewhere interesting to practice.
4
The Whole Ladder In One Place
Instrument rating $11,700, multi-engine $5,100 in the Seminole, commercial and instructor work inside the $89,000 airline track. Nobody has to leave and be checked out again somewhere new after the private certificate. The instructors who taught you to land are the ones who teach you to hold an approach in cloud.
The Fleet
Seven Aircraft And A Simulator
The indoor one earns its keep first. The Redbird MCX is a full-motion simulator at $189 for a one-hour session, it is included in the private pilot packages, and it is where procedures, emergencies and instrument approaches get flown for a fraction of the cost of the airplane. Then the airplanes. Primary training happens in the Cessna 162 Skycatcher, the Piper Warrior or the Diamond DA20, all inside your package. Light, honest machines with current radios and GPS, chosen deliberately for how forgivingly they respond to a beginner getting something wrong, which in the first twenty hours happens often.
After that the fleet has somewhere for you to go. The Piper Arrow II has retractable gear and a constant-speed propeller, which is what complex and commercial training needs. The Piper Seminole is the twin-engine aircraft behind the $5,100 multi-engine rating. The Cirrus SR22 Turbo has a glass panel, air conditioning and a parachute for the whole airframe, and it is the airplane most students eventually want to check out in; the Luxury Cirrus discovery flight from $499 is the quick way to sit in one. All of it lives on one ramp at Van Nuys.
From The Air
Northridge From 2,500 Feet
Four things that resolve immediately on a northbound departure out of Van Nuys.
🎓
The Cal State Northridge Campus
A big block of flat roofs, playing fields and parking structures with the botanic garden and the orange grove in one corner. The grove is the giveaway: several hundred trees in tidy rows where everything else is concrete.
🛍️
Northridge Fashion Center
The mall and its parking decks fill a whole block between Tampa and Plummer, and the roof area alone is bigger than anything near it. On a clear day the white deck tops are visible from the departure end of the runway.
🚂
The Metrolink Line Along Parthenia
A single pair of rails cutting north-west across the street grid at an angle nothing else follows, with the Northridge platform beside Wilbur. It is the most reliable line feature for orienting yourself over the west Valley.
⛰️
Devonshire Aimed At The Santa Susanas
Devonshire Street runs dead straight for miles and stops against the hills above Porter Ranch. From the air it works as a ruler laid across the north Valley, and it puts every cross street in order.
FAQ
Common Questions
Four to five miles depending which end of Northridge you start from, and twelve minutes down Balboa Boulevard on a normal day. From the west side, Reseda Boulevard to Sherman Way is the better run. No freeway is involved at all, which is why lessons here rarely get abandoned because of traffic.
Very likely. Van Nuys generally lands to the south, so arrivals cross Northridge and Granada Hills a few miles out with the gear already down. Part of your training is learning what that approach path actually is and flying it yourself, which permanently changes how the noise sounds from the garden.
It is one of the easier things to fit in, because a lesson including briefing takes about two hours and the airport is ten minutes from campus. We fly from nine in the morning to nine at night, seven days a week. Students usually book a weekday slot around their timetable plus one weekend morning.
The standard course is $10,900 and includes ground school, dual instruction, solo time, the written exam and the checkride. The premium accelerated version is $22,500. If your goal is smaller, a solo certificate is $5,500 and a sport pilot license is $8,400. Financing goes through Stratus Financial and we also run in-house payment plans.
Six to nine months flying twice a week is typical for the private certificate. The FAA minimum is forty hours but most people need fifty-five to seventy, and the variable is almost entirely how often you fly. The premium program compresses this considerably by giving you priority on aircraft and one dedicated instructor.
There is no minimum age for lessons. Sixteen is the age for first solo, seventeen for a private pilot certificate. The teen package is $4,200 and is designed around school terms rather than against them. Plenty of Northridge parents book a discovery flight first, at $229, to see whether the interest is real before committing.
Not to fly with an instructor; you only need identification for that. Before your first solo you need an FAA medical certificate from an aviation medical examiner and a student pilot certificate. If a health condition worries you, tell us early, because the sport pilot route at $8,400 does not require an FAA medical at all.
Our own lot on Balboa Boulevard, free, immediately outside Suite 108A. There is no parking structure, no validation and no walk from a terminal. Come fifteen minutes before your booking so the pre-flight briefing is not rushed, and bring sunglasses; the light over the Valley at 3,000 feet is stronger than it looks from Devonshire.
Talk To Us
Four Miles, One Hour, No Commitment
Book a discovery flight and see your own street from the left seat with your hands on the controls, twelve minutes after you leave the house. Call (818) 290-8249 or come in for the free consultation and we will cost out whichever program actually fits.
Discovery Flight For One
$229
60 minutes, hands on the controls, fully loggable
Book A Discovery Flight
Or Call (818) 290-8249
No Cost, No Obligation
Get The Full Training Plan And Price Sheet
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.
- Every package price, itemised
- Financing from $2,500 down
- A timeline based on your schedule
Loved On Google
Over 100 Reviews. 5.0 Stars.
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
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...
See Discovery Flight Details — $229
Reviews shown verbatim, exactly as each reviewer published them.
Aviation News
Latest From The Field
Notes from the flight line at Van Nuys — weather, regulation changes, checkride questions and the cost of training, written up as they come.
Van Nuys Airport · KVNY
(818) 290-8249
7900 Balboa Blvd. Suite 108A
Van Nuys, CA 91406 Get directions →
Open the full contact page
Open 7 days · 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM
Los Angeles Flight School7900 Balboa Blvd. Suite 108A
Van Nuys, CA 91406 Get directions →
★★★★★
5.0 · 100+ Google reviews