Department of Flight

Operating Seven Days a Week, 51 Weeks a Year

Embry-Riddle's Prescott Flight Department operates seven days a week, closing only for the short break between Christmas and New Year's Day. Normal hours of operation are 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

Embry-Riddle is one of the largest aviation training universities in the nation, and the Prescott campus sits inside roughly 5,000 square miles of uncongested airspace. Our local practice area reaches as far north as the mountains in Flagstaff, east toward Sedona and south into the Bradshaw Mountains, giving students more room to work without waiting in line. 

During cross-country training, our students can fly anywhere from the Southern California coast to the beautiful national parks of Utah and as far east as the mountains in Durango, Colorado.

Our fleet is equipped with the same avionics and flight instrumentation found in today's airliners. Supporting that is a variety of flight training devices that let students experience the hard stuff before they fly it for real, including: full-motion Frasca simulators for both the Cessna 172 and the DA42, and a variety of free resources students can book on their own time, including Redbird trainers, VR simulators and procedure trainers. With new aircraft constantly flowing into the program, students have access to the newest and safest equipment.

Department Location

The Flight Department is located on the edge of Prescott Regional Airport (Ernest A. Love Field). It's a short 10-minute drive from campus, and free shuttle service running frequently to get students where they need to go. 

Operating out of two dispatch facilities on the field allows Embry-Riddle to support hundreds of daily launches and recoveries efficiently. Prescott is an air traffic-controlled field with three runways and a mix of traffic that includes flight training aircraft, helicopters, business jets and scheduled airline service. Students learn to work with air traffic control from their first flight. 

Then, there is the environment itself. With 277-plus days of sunshine a year, our students spend more time in the air and less time grounded waiting for weather to clear. It doesn't hurt that the view out the window is one of the best in the country, the red rocks of Sedona off to the east, the San Francisco Peaks on the horizon and the Grand Canyon less than an hour away. Because the field sits at 5,045 feet, our students learn real performance planning and mountain flying as a matter of routine, not as an add-on course. Graduates leave Prescott already comfortable with the kind of terrain.

Professional and Commercial Airline-Style Approach

Flight students at Embry-Riddle fly an airline-style training program from day one. The structured system teaches each student the importance of thorough preflight preparation, safety-minded flight operations and a rigorous academic approach to understanding the theory and principles that make flight possible.

Students aren't passengers in this process. They plan, brief, debrief and hold each other to the same professional standard the airlines expect, and that habit is what carries them forward. Each of our graduates is fully prepared for the airline environment because they've been living it for the last four years.

Nothing is more satisfying than taking novice flight students and turning them into commercial pilots who are ready for the airlines. We look forward to each new class and to demonstrating why Embry-Riddle has put more pilots in the cockpits of major airlines than any other flight school in the country.