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“We had some people who started to resign, and I was, ‘OK. Obviously these folks know something I don’t,'” Richardson said.

“The reason we stayed without being paid was to see how far we could advance the students and minimize the damage they had already incurred.”

One of those students was Simon Hanington, 39, a business owner and business consultant who enrolled at OAS in September in a mid-life career switch to become an airline pilot. The OAS program promised to train its students as commercial pilots in 18 months and charged $5,300 a month tuition. Hanington was told it would be impossible to hold a job during the program because the workload would be so intense.

But the classwork was sporadic and promised textbooks never arrived. Students were told they’d be flying five times a week, but Hanington struggled to book flight time once or twice a week, and he was doing better than most.

Photo by Tony Caldwell / Postmedia

Suspicious that the company was failing, Hanington began digging into OAS’s financial health, questioning staff about company operations.

“I used to be a strategic consultant, so I’m used to fixing companies,” he said. “I started asking the sort of questions that I needed to ask, like: ‘Did you get paid and how did you get paid?'”

By this time, several months into his training, Hanington had logged about 20 hours of flight time, but he was shocked to learn that some other OAS students had only flown two or three times a month, not the three to five times a week OAS had promised. “And all this time they’re paying $5,300 a month for the privilege,” he said.