Tarzana Flight School at Van Nuys Airport
One turn off Ventura Boulevard and four miles north on Balboa, to a tower-controlled field where your lesson starts within minutes of you parking.
Six miles, one turn, and a runway
Tarzana is close enough to the airport that the drive is barely a factor in the decision. Head east on Ventura Boulevard to Balboa, turn north, and four miles later the fence line is on your right. Eight minutes in the clear, twelve in the middle of the afternoon. There is a version of learning to fly that involves a long freeway run each way and a whole Saturday spent on a single lesson, and from here that version simply does not apply. We are not in Tarzana. LA Flight School is on the field at Van Nuys Airport, Suite 108A at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, and Tarzana is simply where a lot of our students drive from.
The neighbourhood was named after a novel, which is a genuinely odd origin for a place, and the ranch that Edgar Rice Burroughs bought here in 1919 became the streets you now live on. The shape of that land is still legible from the air: the flat grid north of Ventura, the sudden climb into hillside streets south of it, and the golf course fairways cut into the slope where the ground got too steep to subdivide. Most students spot their own roof on lesson two.
A lot of our Tarzana students come from the medical corridor around the hospital on Clark Street. Physicians, anaesthetists, nurses and practice managers keep unusual hours and get real weekday gaps, and both of those suit flight training better than a conventional nine to five does. We fly from nine in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week, and lessons are booked one at a time, so a rota that changes month to month is an inconvenience rather than an obstacle.
The sensible way in is one hour and no commitment. A discovery flight is $229 for a single seat or $299 with somebody in the back on a headset, and you do the flying yourself with an FAA instructor beside you. It is logged as instruction and counts toward the forty hours a private certificate needs, and if you decide to enrol within a day, the whole cost is credited against your programme. Plenty of people book that flight twice before committing to anything.
Training available from Tarzana
Full programme prices, quoted the same to everyone who rings.
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 moreVentura Boulevard to Balboa, then north
The simple version has one turn in it. Take Ventura Boulevard east through Encino to Balboa Boulevard, turn north, and stay on Balboa across Burbank, Victory, Vanowen and Sherman Way. The road runs up the western side of the Sepulveda Basin with the golf courses on your right, and the airport appears shortly after Saticoy. Suite 108A is in the 7900 block. Six miles altogether, and no freeway involved at any point.
Reseda Boulevard north is the other obvious route and is quicker when Ventura is congested around the White Oak junction. Take it to Saticoy or Sherman Way and turn east; both connect to Balboa within a couple of miles. From the hillside streets above Ventura, Vanalden or Tampa down to the boulevard first works fine. Nobody in Tarzana needs to use the 101 for this trip, which is a large part of why the drive stays predictable.
Parking is our own lot, free, immediately outside the door, with no ticket machine and nothing to queue for on the way to the aircraft. Because the hangar complex is shared with several unrelated aviation businesses, aim for the suite number rather than a sign on the street. Arriving about fifteen minutes early is right: the briefing before the flight is part of the lesson, and rushing it costs you air time later.
What Van Nuys adds to the training
Controlled airspace as routine
Two parallel runways, a tower running all day and a traffic mix from light trainers to heavy business jets. Radio work becomes automatic because you have no option but to do it from lesson one. That confidence is exactly what lets a newly certificated pilot fly into Santa Barbara or Long Beach without a second thought.
Very little time wasted
The practice areas start a few minutes after departure, so a booked hour is mostly spent on the lesson rather than in transit. Combined with a six-mile drive, that means a complete flying lesson fits inside a two-hour gap in the day. Over a whole certificate that efficiency shows up as real money.
Weather that keeps the schedule
Inland fields clear earlier than coastal ones and keep flying through mornings that shut the beach airports entirely. Since a training course is essentially a count of lessons actually flown, that difference decides both how long the certificate takes and what it ends up costing you.
Nothing to outgrow
Instrument at $11,700, multi-engine at $5,100, the full airline track at $89,000 with financing through Stratus Financial. Seven aircraft types and a full-motion simulator sit on the same ramp. Whatever you decide to do next, you will not have to find another school or explain your history to a new instructor.
The aircraft you would learn in
Three light aircraft carry most of the early training. The Cessna 162 Skycatcher, the Piper Warrior and the Diamond DA20 all sit inside the same packages, aircraft and instructor priced together. You can switch between them freely, which is useful because they teach slightly different things: the Warrior is the steady four-seat platform, the Skycatcher is light and quick to respond, and the DA20 sits under a bubble canopy that gives an unusually clear view of the ground. All three carry current radios and GPS, so nothing about the navigation has to be relearned when you move up.
The rest of the ramp is what makes staying here worthwhile. Retractable gear and a constant-speed propeller come with the Piper Arrow II. The Cirrus SR22 Turbo is glass-panelled, turbocharged, air conditioned and fitted with a whole-airframe parachute. The Piper Seminole is the twin used for multi-engine training, a $5,100 package on its own. And the Redbird MCX full-motion simulator, $189 for a sixty-minute session, is where instrument procedures, emergencies and unusual attitudes get flown repeatedly without burning either fuel or daylight.
Tarzana from a couple of thousand feet
Four things that make the neighbourhood obvious on an early lesson.
El Caballero's fairways
Green ribbons laid into the folds of the hillside south of Ventura Boulevard, standing out sharply against the dry slope around them. They mark the southern boundary of Tarzana more clearly than any street does.
Reseda Boulevard running arrow-straight
A single line from the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way north across the Valley floor. It is one of the easiest navigational references in the west Valley and students use it constantly.
The Sepulveda Basin reserve
A wide green rectangle of golf courses, sports fields and the wildlife lake, sitting oddly empty in the middle of dense city. You fly along its edge on the way north up Balboa and again shortly after takeoff.
Where the grid gives up
North of Ventura the streets run square; south of it they bend into the hills and stop wherever the slope wins. That boundary is razor-sharp from above and it tells you exactly where you are.
Common questions
Eight to twelve minutes for about six miles. Ventura Boulevard east to Balboa and then north is the simplest route and uses no freeway at all. Reseda Boulevard north to Saticoy and east is the alternative when Ventura is busy. Either way, this is one of the shortest drives to a training airport available anywhere in the Valley.
Yes, and this is the main advantage of living here. With a six-mile drive and practice areas a few minutes from the runway, a full lesson including briefing fits comfortably in a two-hour block. We fly from nine in the morning until nine at night, so early-morning and post-work slots are both genuinely available rather than theoretical.
Sixty minutes in the aircraft with you doing the flying and an FAA instructor beside you, plus the briefing before and the debrief after. It is $229 for one person or $299 for two, with ninety-minute and two-hour versions available. The time is logged and counts toward a certificate, and it is credited in full if you enrol within twenty-four hours.
The standard programme is $10,900, including ground school, dual instruction, solo time, the written exam and the checkride. Comprehensive is $15,900 and premium accelerated is $22,500. A sport pilot licence is $8,400 and a solo-only certificate is $5,500. Financing is available through Stratus Financial or an in-house payment plan.
Yes, and a good number of our Tarzana students do exactly that. Lessons are booked individually rather than as a fixed weekly slot, and we operate every day including weekends. A run of weekday mornings after a stretch of nights works particularly well, because that is when the air is smoothest and the schedule least contested.
The instrument rating at $11,700 is the usual next step and the one that changes what flying is good for. Multi-engine in the Seminole is $5,100 and takes about two weeks flown intensively. Aircraft checkouts are done here too, with the instructors who trained you. We sell packages rather than blocks of flying time, so ring the desk at Suite 108A and we will tell you what is available. Bring your logbook to the free consultation.
It feels that way for roughly two weeks. After that the radio work becomes background rather than foreground, and you have learned something pilots from quiet fields spend years nervously avoiding. Our instructors have fifteen years or more in this exact airspace, and the tower is entirely used to student aircraft in the pattern.
Call (818) 290-8249 and book a discovery flight or the free in-person consultation. We are at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, Suite 108A, open nine to nine every day. If you have flown before, bring the logbook and we will work out what still needs doing rather than quietly starting you over from the beginning.
Ten minutes to your first lesson
Come east along Ventura, turn up Balboa, and be airborne over your own street inside the hour. Call (818) 290-8249 and we will book you in this week.