The life and death of a troubled flight school

One of its students went missing in one of its aircraft in July 2017. His body was recovered four days later in the Everglades.

Later that month, a student and flight instructor experienced an engine failure near Key Biscayne. They made a forced landing on a road, and both walked away from the aircraft.

After both accidents, the flight school’s owner spoke to the media. The dead pilot, he said, had violated the school’s policy about flying alone at night. The owner speculated that the dead pilot had succumbed to spatial disorientation—well before the NTSB issued a final report on the accident.

In the second accident, the owner said that debris blocked fuel from getting to the engine—again, based only on a preliminary NTSB report that indicated that there was no fuel in the left tank and 10 gallons of fuel in the right tank. He also praised the CFI and student for following “proper protocol, [doing] exactly what we train for, and [walking] away.”

I used those incidents last year as a springboard for a Flight School Business article about maybe what not to do after your flight school has experienced an accident. 

At that time, the flight school had a grim reputation in the flying community. I didn’t name Dean International in that article, because the flight school was still in business. But as of July 23 of this year, it had made headlines again—and it had closed its doors.

What happened? In the prior week, two of the flight school’s aircraft were involved in a midair collision over the Everglades. Four people died.

A midair collision is a terrible event, and we won’t know what happened until the NTSB issues a final report, which usually takes about 18 months.

After the accident, Dean International spokesman Robert Dean again spoke to reporters and said the flight school would be closing. The company had “planned on downsizing a little bit, and this took place, and there was just no way. We can’t live with ourselves to know that this took place,” he told Local10.com.

But there’s more. Just before the flight school closed, someone hacked into the company’s website and posted a series of disturbing messages. “You have killed too many students,” said one, according to the Miami Herald.

Dean was one of many Florida-based flight schools that specialize in training foreign students. When the flight school shut down, customers were left wondering what happens next.

A Florida law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Dean International, contending that the owners “closed the school after promising to return all the money the students paid in advance for their pilot’s licenses.” Each student reportedly paid Dean International more than $34,000 for pilot training.

This isn’t the first time a flight school has shut its doors on its customers, and it likely won’t be the last. But the deaths associated with the closure lend an extra note of tragedy to an already sad story.