Thirty-Six Students Paid 70,000 Euros Each to a Bragança Flight School That Qualified Nobody, and the Regulator Has Grounded It

Thirty-six people paid roughly 70,000 euros each to train as commercial pilots at an aerodrome in Trás-os-Montes. Between 2022 and 2025, on a course designed to take two years, the school qualified nobody. On 20 August the board of ANAC, the Autoridade Nacional da Aviação Civil (National Civil Aviation Authority), ordered Lusofly Academy to stop, and the terms of the order were disclosed on Monday.

The suspension is total. Lusofly may not run theoretical classes, practical instruction, flight training or simulator sessions. It has six months to correct the failings the regulator identified, and if it does not, the aeronautical certificate is cancelled for good.

What the regulator found

ANAC's ruling is blunt about the reason. The organisation missed every deadline it had been given and "does not currently have the human, technical, operational and financial means necessary to guarantee the safe exercise of the activity, with a low probability of risk, and in compliance." That is the regulatory language for a flight school that, according to sector sources and its own trainees, had neither enough flight instructors nor serviceable aircraft.

The company had operated from the Aeródromo Municipal de Bragança (Bragança Municipal Aerodrome) since 2022. The problems surfaced publicly in the summer of 2025, when it emerged that not one student had completed the integrated ATP(A) airline transport pilot course. Roughly half the cohort has since left or started transferring elsewhere. Former instructors, service providers, suppliers and the Bragança council itself are claiming debts running to thousands of euros, and there is an execution proceeding under way seeking to seize the school's aeronautical certificate. Asked about the allegations, Lusofly's executive director, João Roque, did not respond.

The students are not being written off

The part of the decision that matters most to anyone caught in it is the safeguard attached. ANAC states that suspending the school does not invalidate acquired rights or the training already completed. Lusofly is expressly ordered to preserve every theoretical, flight and simulator record for each student so that hours already flown and exams already passed travel with them.

Seventeen students on the ATP(A) course have filed formal transfer requests. Thirteen have been completed and four are in technical analysis. The regulator says it is giving these individual files priority handling.

What ANAC cannot do is return the money. The 70,000 euros a head was a commercial contract with a private company that is now facing creditors on several fronts, and recovering any of it is a civil matter for each student to pursue.

What this means for expats

• Check the certificate before you pay, not after: ANAC publishes the approved training organisations it certifies. An aerodrome address and a glossy prospectus are not the same thing as a current approval with the aircraft and instructors to match.
• Ask how many people the school has actually licensed: not how many it has enrolled. Nearly four years and 36 fee-paying students produced no pilots here, and that ratio was visible long before the regulator moved.
• Prepaid training fees carry the school's insolvency risk: money handed over up front for a two-year course sits with a business you cannot inspect. Where a payment plan is available, it limits your exposure.
• Your logged hours are portable, your fees are not: that asymmetry is the practical lesson of this file. The regulator protects the training record; nobody protects the invoice.
• Bragança keeps losing infrastructure it was promised: the aerodrome was meant to anchor a training operation in a district that has spent the year arguing for basic services and was promised a university as recently as Saturday.

Portugal is not short of demand for pilot training. In June the government approved a Lufthansa plan to train German air force pilots on Portuguese soil, and ANAC spent last year rewriting its penalty scale for the operators it supervises. What the Lusofly file shows is the gap at the other end of the market, where a certificate granted in 2022 stayed valid through nearly four years of a school that could not fly.