At the start of the slick ad, an excited announcer intones, "Are you ready to get serious about becoming a professional airline pilot?" The promises are amazing: In less than nine months at Jet University, the announcer says, even students with zero flight experience will land jobs as pilots. Even better, students train in a gleaming new classroom with a fleet of Diamond planes, are eligible for 100 percent financial aid, and even get a guaranteed flying gig after they graduate.
If it sounds too good to be true, a growing class of former students is now alleging in Miami-Dade Circuit Court that the school was a sham. About 50 ex-students now say the school had no federal certification, stole loan money, and lied about job prospects.
"This intentional and fraudulent scheme was devised... so [students] would continue to enroll at Jet U," attorney Robert Parks writes in a complaint.
Parks declined to comment on the suit. Bradley Mark Ottosen, Jet U's manager, no longer has a working phone number in Florida and has not yet entered an attorney representing him onto the court docket.
But Cohen defends his school's record and says he placed more than 150 pilots into commercial flying jobs.
"I feel bad for any students who don't have a job based on where the industry and the economy were when they graduated," says Cohen (who is not named in Parks's lawsuit). "But they received the training they were promised at Jet U."
Jet University set up shop at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in 2006, and advertised heavily online and in pilot magazines. But from the beginning, Parks alleges, the school had no way to keep its promises. Jet U wasn't recognized by federal or state education officials.
So it instead routed student loans through another accredited flight school and then used the cash to fund its marketing campaign, he says. Students invested up to $70,000 in loans to attend the school.
Three years later, in 2009, the school abruptly shut its doors and left more than a hundred students hanging.
Many were so outraged they started a muckraking website -- jetuniversitysucks.com -- to push for better regulations on flight schools. Here's the school's advertising videos that many say pulled them into the program:
No hearing dates have been set in the lawsuit, which Parks filed on Feb. 10.
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