Flight School Owned by a Retired Marine Is On a Mission to Help End the Pilot Shortage
Photo Credit: A commercial pilot-in-training checks the plane at the flight line. Skift / Photo courtesy of Coast Flight School
Skift Take
As the travel recovery looks to ramp up for summer travel, a pilot shortage isn't helping any. The time to invest in pilots is at the pilot training level by making it easier to get loans, financing, and scholarships.
A Texas educational lending company and a California flight school are teaming up for a new initiative with the promise to make flight training more affordable and accessible and thereby help reduce pilot shortages in the United States.
The partnership between San Diego-based Coast Flight Training, a military veteran-owned flight school training future airline pilots, and Meritize, a lending company specializing in financial solutions for skills-based education and training, makes student pilots at Coast Flight Training eligible to apply for Meritize's merit-based financing based on their past military and educational experience.
"We evaluate people based not just on their credit profile, but on what they've accomplished either academically or in military service, or in some cases what they've done in terms of work history. And we take that heavily into account," said Chris Keaveney, CEO of Meritize.
Meritize, which was founded on the premise that there was a really big proble
