Aviation & Electronics Schools of America

I recently attended this school in order to prepare for my FAA airframe and powerplant license. With this review, I intend to give an honest, objective dissertation of my personal experience with this business.
We’ll start with the good:
The owner is an experienced aircraft mechanic and has been teaching the curriculum for quite a while.
The bad:
Aside from a few other smaller complaints, my biggest, most absolute complaint is two fold related to the facilities. The actual place of business is located in a small part of an attached restaurant. The actual office was not accurately represented on the website. It was a completely different building. There was no air conditioning or restroom located on AESA’s side of the building. You have to use the restroom in the restaurant next door and I frequently wondered if it was an accepted agreement between AESA and the restaurant. The restaurant is closed on Monday so if you have to use the bathroom that day, you’re probably stuck going down the street. However, I was never comfortable enough to stick around that long. With regard to climate control, there’s a fan located in the study room. This wasn’t near sufficient if the temperature got above 90 degrees.
Since the office is located right next to the restaurant, you will frequently hear music thumping through the walls. It was extremely distracting if you were trying to study.
The staff, while friendly, could be heard having frequent arguments amongst each other within customer earshot (me).
There is no actual instruction by a real person. Test prep was accomplished by some pretty dated VHS videos that could not be taken home. The videos were simply of the instructor reading the practice test questions then reading you the answers. There were some brief explanations after most test questions that did help me remember the answers to some questions.
Their business hours are 9 AM to 1 PM. Watching the videos has to be done during this time.
The advertised average time to getting an A&P through this prep school is 5 – 7 days. I found this to be an extremely tight timeline. If you’re a working professional already, I’d say that a more realistic completion time is 1 to 2 months.
There were no benchmarks to indicate whether you were ready to test or not. Whether you’re ready to test or not depends completely on how you feel about it. When I asked if I was ready to test, the response was simply «if you feel like you’re ready.» I thought this was really strange considering the amount of money I spent for the test prep. I ended up using ASA’s prepware to both study and measure my performance which turned out to be very successful.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll pass the tests either. However, the business claims that they haven’t had anyone fail in XX years. Unfortunately, if you fail the test, you’ll simply take it again until you to pass at the expense of another testing fee that isn’t included in the preparation price. No one that commits to getting their license will fail in the end. It’s just a matter of how many times you’ll have to take the test.
I did get instruction from a real person for the practical preparation but it was no more than an hour. It was basically designed to give me an idea of how the actual oral and practical will work.
If I had to do it all over again, I’d shop around and look for a business that offers A&P test preparation online and an in-​person oral and practical prep. I drove an hour round trip to AESA on the days I studied at their office which raised the overall cost of getting my license in terms of both time and money.