About Us

How We Started

Run by myself, Justin Weinberg (CFI/CFII/MEI, ATP), Peregrine Flight Training was founded in 2024 with the goal of making aviation, and it’s pilots, safer.

Having been a flight instructor for four years before moving into the airline world, I fell in love with instructing. After flying jets for nearly two years, I decided that I genuinely missed being an instructor, and made the decision to start this company.

Our Mission

Primarily serving the greater Seattle, WA area, the goal of Peregrine Flight Training is to make better and safer pilots. Many flight schools offer training that is faster than the competition, or cheaper, but rarely do they offer quality as their foremost goal. Sure, those schools may have great pass rates, but that is because they only teach to the checkride, just trying to get you in the door and back out as fast as possible. As many experienced pilots know, what you need to know in order to pass a checkride, and what you need to know to be a safe pilot, are rarely the same. Peregrine Flight Training aims to address this gap in training through scenario based training that emphasizes real world experience over pure book knowledge.

Our Guiding Principles

  1. Safety First, Always - No matter what we do, we will always put safety first and foremost.

  2. Lead by Example - Conduct ourselves in the most professional and safe manner possible.

  3. Pilot Proficiency - Train our pilots, both instructors and students alike, to be the best and most prepared they can be.

  4. Quality over Quantity - Take the time to train the best pilots possible, rather than pushing as many students through the door as possible.

About The Owner

Justin Weinberg, CFI/CFII/MEI, ATP

I started my aviation journey in 2013 in Titusville, Florida. After attending the Titusville airshow, my parents decided to buy me a biplane ride. For an extra fee, the pilot offered to put the control stick into the my seat, and let me fly the plane. My parents agreed, and shortly thereafter on that beautiful spring afternoon, I was at the controls of 1941 Waco Bi-Plane, flying over the Kennedy Space Center. It was such an influential experience that the next day, my parents brought me back to the airshow, and let me go fly the plane again. A month later, I began my flight training.

I flew my first solo on my 16th birthday, the first day you can legally do so. I didn’t even have my drivers license yet, and had to be driven home by my parents after flying an airplane all by myself. One year later, I took my private pilot checkride on my 17th birthday, also the youngest you can be to take the checkride.

After graduating high school, I went to Middle Tennessee State University where I earned my B.S. in Aerospace, Professional Pilot in 2020. I received my instrument, commerical, CFI, and multi-engine ratings there, in the first highly structured flight school I had ever experienced, having come from a mom and pop shop style flight school.

While I was wrapping up my college degree, I began flight instructing in 2018, first as an independent CFI at my local flying club, providing complex training in a Turbo Arrow, still one of my favorite airplanes to fly.

I worked around a few different flight schools in the area following that, mostly just trying to find good work around the area in what was a very competitive job market, and then the near non-existent demand in 2020 following the arrival of COVID-19.

In that time of going from school to school, I worked at just about every type of school possible. Flight schools targeted at military service members, mom and pop shops that mostly trained recreational pilots, and 141 schools that focused on training career orientated pilots.

It was at that last school that in addition to my duties of being a flight instructor, I became a Flight Operations Assistant. While the title may not sound glamorous, I essentially functioned as the general manager of the school for a period of about 2 months, while the actual general manager was on a leave of absence. I directly oversaw the day-to-day operation of the flight school during that time, and overseeing my fellow flight instructors.

During that time, I realized what I think is a systemic issue in flight training these days, a lack of real world experience amongst our instructors. The truth is that most of our instructors, while they may be good at teaching, don’t have much of any real world experience. Most of what they teach is simply what they were taught. Most instructors are just there to build flight time, and move on to the next job as soon as they can. This leads to a system where flight instructors are trained, become CFIs, and then regurgitate that information to their students. Most CFIs stop learning at this phase, stop trying to better themselves or their knowledge, just trying to build flight time as quickly as possible and get to where they really want to be, not truly caring about their students. I wanted to change that.

As time allowed, I took opportunities to mentor my junior instructors and try to make them more well rounded as not just instructors, but pilots as well. I began trying to expose them to real situations that I had experienced, stuff that you aren’t normally taught how to handle, but you read about in books and watch in videos.

It was during this time I realized just how much I loved instructing, and made the decision that I never wanted to give this up.

Not long after though in 2022, it was my turn to move on to the next job, and I became an airline pilot, which originally had been my goal all along. I learned a ton of new things that quite frankly shocked me that we don’t teach in the general aviation world. I finally realized a lot of the reasons that airline travel was so incredibly safe, but general aviation by comparison, was the complete opposite. Training, and an incredible safety program.

I continue to fly jets at the airlines to this day, and love every second of it. However I really began to miss GA flying, and instructing. In January of 2024, I was due for my bi-annual flight instructor renewal. During the process of completing the course, I realized I had so many ideas of how to change the status quo, and change aviation for the better. I made the decision right then that it was time to begin flight instructing once again, and founded Peregrine Flight Training.

I hope to make to make a positive impact on aviation, and continue doing the good I had been doing previously before I moved on to the airlines.