Would I Pick Midway Again? [Updated]

Dave Stros asked:

I live in Chicago, and I’m trying to understand the pro’s and con’s of flight instruction out of Midway. Given the hassles, if you had to do it again, would it make more sense to drive to PWK or DPA instead of dealing with MDW? Thanks for your insight!

Instead of leaving an answer buried in a comment thread, I’m going to address it in a full post. It’s something to which I’ve given some thought as I look ahead to getting an instrument rating. Knowing what I know now, I would still train for my private pilot’s license out of Midway. The only change would be to get trained in the DA20 instead of the DA40 due to the expense.

I chose Midway for a couple of reasons, and those reasons still hold.

1. Foremost is convenience. It is very easy for me to get from work to MDW and from my home to MDW by car and by public transit. Thus, I can schedule time with more freedom than I could at the airports that are farther out. In fact, the chief flight instructor at Windy City Flyers out of PWK told me that I should fly at MDW if it meant I’d fly more frequently. Particularly at the beginning of the training, frequency is everything. Obviously, if your situation is different such that DPA or PWK is easier to access, those airports may make more sense in your case.
2. As an extension of convenience, I expect to do most of my flying out of Midway once I get my private pilot’s license. It’s well situated to be a meet-up point with my wife after work on Fridays when we take-off for a weekend trip. Fighting rush hour traffic out of the city to DPA or PWK would be counter-productive. For the amount of time we would be stuck in traffic to get to those airports, we will be well on our way leaving from Midway. It’s only 35 minutes for me from the city on the Orange Line and my wife has driven from her office to the flight school in 45 minutes on surface roads.
3. Midway is a big airport. Huge. If it weren’t so close to O’Hare, Midway would be a Class B airport (based on the quantity and type of traffic). Having learned at Midway, I’m not afraid of any other airport. I’m currently planning my long, solo cross-country trip and I’m picking Class C airports without hesitation. I look at Class C airports like Champaign-Urbana and Peoria and think “awwww, what cute little airports”. Okay, I’m not really that snotty about it, but you get the idea.
4. This is a stupid reason, but it was a factor for me: I fell in love with an airplane (the DA40, obviously) and Midway Aviators has a couple and would let me train in them.

Knowing what I know now, the most important nugget of wisdom I can give to people interested in flying is to find an instructor that is a good match for you. I’ve told this to my co-workers when they’ve asked me about flight lessons. You will read this over and over in the literature, from AOPA’s Flight Training magazine to various blogs by students and instructors alike. I can’t emphasize it enough. Where you get your training is very much a secondary consideration to finding a flight instructor who is a good match for you. I recommend flying with a couple of different instructors—even once you’ve found one that you like. Know that you have options. I didn’t do this, and I should have. (That’s not a judgement against Bill—Bill trained me very well and tried various training techniques to discover the ones that worked best with me.) Finding the right instructor will save you money—potentially a lot of money—because you will learn things faster and they will stay with you better. You want your instructor’s words to stay with you as best possible because it’s going to be his or her training on which you rely as a low-hour pilot facing an emergency in the cockpit.

When I was looking at flight schools, some schools and some literature suggested that smaller airports are better for students. They give lots of reasons. Big airports are big, so you’ll spend more time taxi-ing than at a small airport. Big airports are busy so you’ll spend more time on the ground waiting your turn to take-off. Big airports treat small planes as second-class citizens. Big airplanes are under big airspace, so you’ll need to fly further to get to a training area, costing you time (and, hence, money). Of these criticisms, only the last one is really true for Midway.

• Midway is a big airport, so when the winds are out of the south, I spend more time taxing over the other end of the field than I might at a smaller airport. The flip side is that I’m good at taxi-ing now—and I’m comfortable with the complicated taxiway systems of large airports. I’m also comfortable speaking with ground control. “Four Left by Foxtrot-Kilo-Yankee hold short of Four Right.” No problem. “Cross Three One Center without delay; traffic on four mile final.” No worries. Most of the time, the wind is from the north so I use 31L—which is so ridiculously close to GA parking that ground control just says “taxi to three one left” and ignores the taxiway instructions. The other common runway is 4L, which isn’t far and affords a wonderful view of downtown.
• Of my 40+ lessons so far (yeah, yeah, I’m a little behind on my blogging), there have only been four occasions on which I’ve spent more than a couple minutes waiting my turn for departure. Midway is so big that it has runways just for small airplanes: 4L-22R and 13R-31L. This is different than many Class D airports like Gary, DuPage, Aurora, and Palwaukee, which use the same runways for jets and small planes. (Business jets do use 4L-22R and 13R-31L, but I’ve only seen it a couple of times.) Thus, I’ve come to expect getting off the ground pretty quickly.
• I’ve never felt like a second-class citizen at Midway. The Southwest pilots in the 737s smile and wave as they taxi by—which is totally cool of them. Concerning the controllers, as a rule, they have been the nicest I’ve spoken to so far. (The controllers at Rockford were also very nice during my night cross country, but the controllers at Gary always seem cold and aloof.) Midway ground control has yelled at me once, but that day they were yelling at Southwest pilots as well so I wasn’t getting poor treatment just because I was a student and/or in a small airplane. The incident was very out of character for Midway controllers and only happened once. When I leave Midway airspace, the controllers always wish me a good day or a good flight lesson; when I return, they usually greet me with a “welcome back”. I really get the sense that they are real people happy to work with everyone. After all this time flying to and from Midway, it really feels like home to me and the controllers significantly contribute to that environment.
• I do have to fly further from the air field than I would at other airports. It’s about 15 minutes to Lansing and Gary, where Midway Aviators does most of its instruction. That’s a half hour you’re paying for, leaving and returning, which seems like wasted time to read about it in the literature. Bill was good about using that time for instruction at the beginning of my training, both ways, so it didn’t represent much “lost” time. Once I was able to handle flying the plane and handling the communications myself during those 15 minutes, the time did lose some value for instruction. I’ll note, though, that I was comfortable with flying the plane and handling the communications with Midway (which is a trick, since there is a lot of chatter and you need to remain vigilant for your callsign while listening to your instructor and flying the plane) within my first 15 hours of instruction. There are long-time pilots who can’t handle that; I know since I hear them blow their instructions every once in a while and get reprimanded for their inattention. Anyway, this “lost time” goes away partially when you get to cross-countries because the return trip is direct home to Midway. And, honestly, I’ve never felt that the time to and from Midway was wasted. Earlier in my training, it was explicit instruction on radio communications within controlled airspace. After that, it was practice with radio communications and learning to form a mental picture of the activity around the airport based on the instructions. Since then, it has remained valuable to hear the professional airline pilots interact with the controllers. And most importantly, after bad lessons I really appreciated the time to collect myself and enjoy flying before getting back to the flight school—it’s my “Walden Pond time”.

You asked about the hassles I’ve had. To which hassles you are referring? There certainly have been hassles, but I’d like to provide specific answers to your question about them. Please drop me another comment and let me know.

[Updated: I’ve thought of one more thing to add. My discussion has been mostly about Midway as an airport and not covered Midway Aviators as a flight school. Midway Aviators has a character to it that appeals to me. The owners are relatively young (mid- and late-thirties, I’d guess) and seem to have started the school as a way to afford flying, which is clearly a passion for them. As such, they and the other instructors are permanent fixtures at the school, rather than the transient crowd that you find at many schools. In fact, the only instructor I know at the school who is planning to become an airline pilot is Bill. The environment at the school is comfortable. I feel I can drop by any time and do some hanger flying, chat with the instructors, other students, and other pilots. I’ve hung out at the school on weekends and been fed pizza, Portillo’s or whatever else the group was having for lunch those days—and they refused my contributions for my portion of the food. It’s a good group that likes to hang out, have fun, and swap stories.]