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
Private Pilot Training For Sherman Oaks, At Van Nuys
Six miles up Balboa Boulevard from Ventura and you are at the airport whose traffic you have been listening to for years, this time from the left seat.
5.0★100+ reviews on Google
$5,500to solo certificate
2,000+introductory flights flown safely
9-9every day, including weekends
Local
The Airport You Already Live Underneath
Sherman Oaks is close enough that the airplanes are part of the background here. If you live north of Ventura Boulevard you have spent years watching trainers turn over the basin on a clear afternoon, and if you live in the hills you have watched them from above. What almost nobody realizes is how short the gap is between being the person on the ground and being the person flying: six miles of surface street, one phone call and a first flight that costs $229.
Proximity is not a small advantage. It is the single biggest predictor of whether somebody actually finishes a certificate. Fifteen minutes each way means a lesson fits into a weekday evening without eating the evening. It also means a cancellation for wind or a maintenance swap costs you almost nothing, so you shrug and take a slot on Thursday instead. The people who give up on flying are almost always the ones for whom every lesson was a two-hour round trip before the engine even started.
The Sherman Oaks students we see reflect the neighborhood. Business managers and agents from the offices along Ventura, doctors and dentists with practices between Woodman and Hazeltine, contractors and designers, empty-nesters from the streets climbing toward Mulholland who have decided that this is the year, and a steady run of teenagers from Notre Dame and Buckley who can hold a certificate at seventeen. Several of them fly with us in the morning and are back at a desk by eleven.
There is nothing coy about the pricing. A first flight with you at the controls is $229 for sixty minutes, and it is logged instruction rather than a sightseeing ride. Training to first solo is $5,500. The standard private certificate is $10,900, the comprehensive version $15,900. Enroll within a day of your first flight and its cost comes off the tuition entirely. Financing runs through Stratus Financial or an in-house payment plan, and the consultation where we lay out the real numbers costs nothing.
Training Packages
Six Ways To Begin, All A Quarter Hour Away
Every figure below is a whole price for a whole program, published rather than quoted.
Most Popular
Standard Private Pilot
$10,900
The full FAA Private Pilot Certificate. Where most students start.
Learn MorePremium Private Pilot
$22,500
The widest margin of hours for students who want no surprises.
Learn MoreInstrument Rating
$11,700
The rating that makes a license useful in Southern California weather.
Learn MoreEvery course above is a package, not an hourly rate — the price covers the aircraft, your instructor, ground school and the simulator time in that package. Financing is available through Stratus Financial and through in-house payment plans, and a discovery flight is credited in full against any package if you enroll within 24 hours. All training is flown from Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), 7900 Balboa Blvd, Suite 108A.
Discovery Flights
Try 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
$499/ 60 min
The SR22 Turbo, glass cockpit. 90 min $699, 120 min $949.
Learn MoreRedbird Simulator Session
$189/ 1 hr
FAA-approved full-motion MCX, on the field at Van Nuys.
Learn MoreGetting Here
Six Miles Up Balboa, No Freeway Involved
From anywhere along Ventura Boulevard, turn north onto Balboa and stay on it. You cross Burbank Boulevard, Victory, Vanowen, Sherman Way and Saticoy, with the golf courses and open ground of the basin on both sides for the first stretch, and our building is on the right just before Roscoe. Six miles, twelve to fifteen minutes on an ordinary evening. If you are coming from the east side of Sherman Oaks, Burbank Boulevard west to Balboa and then north is exactly the same idea.
The one thing to avoid is the interchange. There is no reason for a Sherman Oaks student to touch the 101 or the 405 at all, and every reason not to between four and seven. Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda both run north as alternatives if Balboa is dug up, though Sepulveda through the basin narrows and slows in the evening. Sherman Way east or Victory east will bring you back across if you overshoot, which people do on their first visit.
Parking is our own lot at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, free, ungated and with spaces right outside. Come to Suite 108A: this is a shared hangar complex housing a number of unrelated aviation companies, several with similar-sounding names, so the suite number is the thing to look for rather than a sign at the roadside. Bring photo identification the first time and wear closed shoes. We fly from nine in the morning until nine at night.
Why Van Nuys
What The Fifteen Minutes Buys You
1
Weeknight Lessons Are Realistic
A six o'clock booking from Sherman Oaks means leaving at half past five and being home before nine. That is the difference between flying twice a week and flying twice a month, and it is worth more to your final cost than any discount anybody could offer you on a price list.
2
You Already Know The Ground
Navigation training is far easier when the first landmarks you use are your own streets. Students from here pick up ground reference work quickly because they can see where they are without a chart, which frees attention for the actual skill being taught rather than for working out which reservoir that is.
3
A Tower And Real Traffic
Two parallel runways under a control tower that works all day, with corporate jets, helicopters and trainers all in the mix. You learn clearances and sequencing from your first lessons rather than putting them off, and that is what makes flying into an unfamiliar busy airport afterward feel entirely normal.
4
Everything Under One Roof
Trainers, a complex single, a twin, a glass-panel Cirrus and a full-motion simulator, with maintenance in the same complex. Whether you stop at a private certificate or carry on to an instrument rating and beyond, nothing about the next step involves finding another school or explaining yourself to new instructors.
The Fleet
The Airplanes Your Package Puts You In
Early lessons are flown in the Cessna 162 Skycatcher or the Piper Warrior, both covered by your package. They are unglamorous by design: light on the controls, forgiving of a heavy landing, and entirely incapable of hiding a lazy foot on the rudder from your instructor. The Diamond DA20 has a bubble canopy that puts the Santa Monica Mountains and the whole basin in view at once. Between flights, the Redbird MCX full-motion simulator, $189 for a sixty-minute session, is where emergencies and instrument procedures get drilled cheaply.
After the certificate the same ramp keeps offering more. The Piper Arrow II has retractable gear and a constant-speed propeller, which is the complex aircraft time commercial students need. The Cirrus SR22 Turbo brings a full glass cockpit and a whole-airframe parachute, and it turns a Friday afternoon into dinner in Monterey. The Piper Seminole is the twin used for the $5,100 multi-engine rating. All of it sits on one ramp at Van Nuys Airport, six miles north of Ventura Boulevard, and anything you learn to fly here you can carry on flying once an instructor has checked you out in it.
From The Air
Sherman Oaks From The Downwind Leg
Depart to the south and your own neighborhood is under the wing before the climb has finished.
🛣️
The 101 And 405 Interchange
The great tangle of flyovers where the two freeways cross, laid out below you like a wiring diagram. Seeing it from two thousand feet finally explains why the merge behaves the way it does at half past five.
🏙️
The Galleria At Ventura And Sepulveda
The office towers and the low retail block on the north-east corner make the most obvious fix in Sherman Oaks. Ventura Boulevard runs east and west from it in a dead straight line for miles.
🏰
Sherman Oaks Castle Park
The mock castle and its floodlit driving range sit right beside the 405, unmistakable from the air even at a few thousand feet. Students use it constantly as a turning point on the way back in.
🏡
The Hill Streets Under Mulholland
The tight curls of road climbing from Ventura up to the ridge, with pools scattered through the canopy between them. The line where the housing stops and the brush begins is startlingly sharp from above.
FAQ
Common Questions
Twelve to fifteen minutes for most of the neighborhood, straight up Balboa Boulevard from Ventura with no freeway at all. From the east end, Burbank Boulevard west and then north works out the same. It is close enough that an evening lesson does not consume the evening, which is the main reason students from here progress quickly.
In our own lot at 7900 Balboa Boulevard, free and ungated, with spaces immediately outside the entrance. The office is Suite 108A. The address is a shared hangar site with several separate aviation businesses inside it, so use the suite number rather than looking for a sign from the road on your first visit.
Partly, yes. Circuits and landing practice happen in the pattern around the airport, which is the traffic you already hear. The rest of your training happens further out, over the open country north and west of the valley, where maneuvers like stalls and steep turns are flown with plenty of room underneath.
The standard course is $10,900. The comprehensive version, with a great deal more instruction and simulator time built in, is $15,900, and the premium course is $22,500. Add the FAA written exam fee and the examiner's fee for the checkride. Your first flight is credited in full if you enroll within twenty-four hours of it.
Faster than most. Two lessons a week is genuinely easy from here, and at that rate four to six months to a checkride is normal. Forty hours is the FAA minimum and hardly anybody finishes there; sixty to seventy is the realistic range. Frequency is the lever, and proximity is what makes frequency possible.
There is no minimum age to begin lessons. Solo comes at sixteen and the certificate at seventeen, so a fourteen or fifteen year old can start and pace the training toward those birthdays. The teen package is $4,200 and is built around a school year. Several families in Sherman Oaks are working through it at the moment.
No, but you cannot fly solo without one, so start early. An FAA aviation medical examiner issues it and there are several within a few miles of Sherman Oaks. If any part of your medical history might need extra paperwork, get the process moving in your first week rather than at hour twenty.
Yes. You fly the aircraft from the left seat with an FAA-certified instructor beside you, and the time goes into a logbook in your name and counts toward a certificate. It is $229 for sixty minutes, $299 for ninety, and the whole fee comes off your tuition if you enroll within a day of flying it.
Talk To Us
Book A Lesson From Sherman Oaks
Call (818) 290-8249 and take a weeknight slot; from Ventura Boulevard you are six miles and about fifteen minutes away. We are at 7900 Balboa Blvd, Suite 108A, open nine until nine every day, with free parking and a free first consultation.
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