Students say Denison flight school owes them thousands

Denison, Texas: There is new information on Air Safety Flight Academy, which announced yesterday that all operations were temporarily suspended.
Nine international students say ASFA owes them thousands of dollars, part of it for visa extensions they never got. The students from India did not want to appear on camera because their I-94 visas are expired.
The students say ASFA took $9,000 from them claiming it was to pay for extending their visas, but that never happened. Now they’re worried about being forced to leave the country, and never receiving their pilots license, and having no hope of getting repayment from ASFA if they have to go back to India.
A former flight instructor who worked for Air Safety at their Glendale, Arizona, school says this same company suspended operations there too due to money problems, and eventually closed that facility altogether.
ASFA still hasn’t returned our phone calls, but did release an official statement:
“Air Safety Flight Academy has temporarily suspended all operations. The suspension went into effect as of January 11th, 2010. ..The suspension is a direct result of the poor economy coupled with the fact that Air Safety’s two biggest Chinese clients owe Air Safety Flight Academy more than $2 million dollars… What has further aggravated the situation is the paucity of available funding in the United States for domestic students to undergo commercial pilot training. ..we hope that we can resume training this year.”
13/01/10 Maddie Garret/KXII.com, Texas, USA