American Flyers
A national training brand operating since 1939, with a Scottsdale location. Structured, long-established, and priced like a professional academy.
American Flyers has been training pilots since 1939, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating flight training brands in the United States. Its Scottsdale location is one of several across the country, running the same standardized curriculum the brand has refined for over eight decades rather than an instructor's individual approach.
That longevity shows up in the public record: this is a well-reviewed, polished operation, not a fixer-upper. What you are choosing when you choose American Flyers over a smaller Scottsdale-area independent is a national brand's structure and consistency over a single owner-operator's personal attention — a real trade-off, not a strictly better or worse one.
The facts
- Airport
- Scottsdale Airport (KSDL)
- Founded
- 1939 — one of the oldest flight training brands in the US
- Structure
- National multi-location academy with a standardized curriculum
- Phone
- 480-939-3997
- Website
- americanflyers.com
Public reviews: Google shows a 5.0 rating across 7 reviews (checked July 2026). We show that as plain text rather than dressing it up as our own rating, because we did not collect it and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it is good at
- Eighty-plus years of continuous operation — a track record almost no independent school in Arizona can match.
- A standardized, national curriculum, which typically means consistent training quality regardless of which instructor you draw.
- A genuinely strong public reputation as of July 2026, across a modest but clean review base.
- Multiple locations nationally, useful if you relocate mid-training and want continuity with the same training organization.
What to go in knowing
- The review sample size, while positive, is still small — worth reading the actual reviews rather than the star average alone.
- National-brand pricing generally runs closer to a professional academy than to a budget independent school; confirm current rates directly.
- As a franchise-style national brand, expect a more standardized, less personally-flexible training relationship than a single-owner school.
American Flyers is not currently a partner school, so there is no booking button here — just their own number and their own website, unchanged. We list every Arizona school we can verify, partner or not. Are you this school? Here is what partnering looks like.
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Tell us what you are after and we will tell you honestly whether American Flyers is your best fit or whether something else in Arizona suits you better. Then we book it. You pay the school directly, at the school's own price.