houstondan wrote:
michael...thanks for the follow-up. yes, now that you mention it, i
do
remember someone last spring mentioning that after i got my ppl, i
needed to get with "a woman" somewhere southish about tailwheel etc.

That would be the one. Joy is very highly regarded. I've never flown
with her (or at her flight school), but I have seen the results when
people do. I've seen her take marginal pilots and make excellent
pilots in just a few hours.

very good, i will look into that further. if i can impose (on
someone)
some more; how do i find anything about "harvey & rihn" on the ntsb
site.

Go to the search engine:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp

You can get a good start just by entering rihn (or harvey % rihn) into
the text box that says:
Enter your word string below
This won't get you everything, but it will be a start.

You can learn more about how to do searches simply by clicking on the
Examples link to the right of that text box.

You can learn more by searching for accidents at LaPorte, but you have
to be more careful there because H&R isn't the only FBO there.

In general, you can learn a lot about a flight school by looking
through the NTSB reports. While the NTSB will not report the name of
the pilot, it will report the name of the owner and operator if this is
not the pilot. However, even when maintenance is clearly the cause of
the accident, the NTSB will not report what maintenance facility did
the work unless it was under the control of the owner-operator (just a
bit of bias there, don't you think?) which makes it difficult to
evaluate the maintenance practices of a flight school/FBO unless they
are so bad that their own aircraft are crashing due to poor
maintenance.

also, isn't there a site where i can plug in a tail # and get
details on the plane, owner history etc???

http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm

And for pilots, the site is:
http://162.58.35.241/aadatabase/login.asp

Michael