Pro Pilot Training Evolving to Industry Needs

Last week a number of sources, including the Nashua Telegraph, reported that Daniel Webster College was phasing out its professional pilot training program. It’s not the first flight training program to close, nor will it be the last, but that it is an accredited collegiate degree program is significant.  It means that the evolution professional pilot training, which started after Vietnam, may well be reshaping itself once again to meet the demands of the industry it serves. 

For an idea of what may soon face flight schools, collegiate or not, look at what the airlines have gone through over the past decade or so. Like any over populated species, the weak become carrion for the stronger lines. (A trivia question: can you name all the airlines now extinct that made a name for themselves in the last century?)

As the airlines contract, so does the need for pilots, so the death of respected pro pilot training programs is only natural, as in selection. Running a flight training op is expensive, which is why Danny Webster’s program is going away. And it is not the only collegiate program in jeopardy.

Everyone is hard up for money these days (except Wall Streeters), so the shortfall in state funds to Minnesota State University in Mankato is in the $6-10 million range, according to a story in the Mankato Free Press. MSU’s aviation program leads the money-saving list of cuts, reducing the shortfall by $400,000. No decision has yet been made in Mankato, but it is a safe bet that it is not the only small collegiate aviation program facing this evolutionary decision.

We shouldn’t get too excited about this change. It’s just natural selection in action, the economic expansion and contraction of markets. Really, most small collegiate pro pilot training programs aren’t that old. They were born after Vietnam ended, when Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines.

Before deregulation, most airlines pilots were former military, but the drawdown that follows any conflict severely reduced their numbers. At the same time, deregulation was an airline growth hormone and all the existing lines competed on price, doing more with less. Deregulation was also a fertility drug that produced the rapidly breeding litters of regional carriers. They all needed pilots, which they couldn’t afford to train, so they offered jobs to new and wannabe pilots who could pay for their own training.

At first, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent companies, including those like FlightSafety International were in the pay-for-training business. Setting up such a training program isn’t cheap, so many soon failed, and others gave it up for their corporate training bread and butter. Seeing an opportunity, two- and four-year schools, which have pockets a bit deeper thanks to state education funding, saw an opportunity and acted on it. Students were still paying for their training, but at an accredited, degree-granting institution at least they could get federal student loans (often totaling between $50-100K).

And now, it seems, that era is coming to a close. (New copilot flight hour requirements, if approved, might cause another evolutionary training turn of some sort.) Tomorrow’s professional pilots, most of them anyway, will learn the trade in a collegiate setting. But they won’t have as many choices, because the survivors will be the big schools, like Embry-Riddle and the University of North Dakota. And let’s not forget the evolution of a pilot’s workplace, from the cockpit to the cubicle. And here, too, training programs are evolving (see UND Plants Seeds of No-Pilot Airliners). — Scott Spangler