AOPA Aviation Summit

Bahamas Challenge Rewards Winter Escape

October 23, 2012 by Scott Spangler

When you live in Wisconsin, where this October day never really dawned under thick ominous clouds and the temperature is struggling to reach the 40s, an e-mail about flying to the Bahamas really gets a pilot’s attention. And by doing so, earning a chance to win 23 hotel nights at top resorts on various islands makes it that much more appealing.

The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism debuted its Pilot Challenge during the just concluded AOPA Aviation Summit in Palm Springs (ah, more warm and sunny skies). The goal is two-fold, said Neil Glazer, one of 11 Bahamas Flying Ambassadors in the US, and president of PilotMall.com, which is administering the challenge. The first is to attract new pilots to the island chain that starts about 60 miles from the Florida coast; if they’ve already made the flight, it’s cause to explore islands not already visited.

Pilots who document landings at 12 of the 20 Bahamas airports of entry before November 30, 2013 are eligible for one of four hotel-night prizes. Winners will be selected at random and announced in December 2013. Registering at www.bahamaspilotchallenge.com gets pilots the official challenge passport that customs officials must validate at qualifying airports. (It’s also where you’ll find FAQs, rules, and other info.)

Good Next Step: Advancing Pilot Community

September 24, 2012 by Scott Spangler

Certainly more details about its new Center to Advance the Pilot Community will be broadcast during October’s AOPA Aviation Summit in Palm Springs, but that doesn’t satisfy my need to know now. Ah, curiosity is an impatient task master, so I sat down with my buddy Google.

Having worked with him during my tenure at EAA, Adam Smith is an excellent choice to lead the new program. Attuned to pilots of every interest, he’s passionate and knowledgeable about not only aviation, but ferreting out the tangible and intangible things that lift their wings.

But the announcements of Adam’s appointment didn’t tell me a lot about how the new entity was going to Advance the Pilot Community. That I found further down Google’s list, in the position description of the now expired help wanted ad. By adding new initiatives to those already in place, the center stands a better chance of success than any previous effort I can think of thanks to its multifaceted approach.

Women & Aviation: Still No Real Change

January 2, 2011 by Scott Spangler

As part of the conversation on the AOPA survey on why students drop out of aviation, we got an e-mail from Dr. Penny Rafferty Hamilton, Ph.D. She had recently completed a two-year research project that led to Teaching Women to Fly, which shares the results.

And they are depressing.

What makes them such a downer is not just the scarcity of female pilots, who are just 6 percent of the pilot population. It’s that their numbers have not grown, despite 20 years of trying by Women in Aviation International and other groups and individuals.

Like the dropout rate, this static, single-digit aviation participation by roughly half the population is another indictment against the industry’s rep of being innovative and forward looking, forward thinking, and forward acting. It is further evidence that aviation tradition is impeding its progress.

CPC Training Sets Customer Service Baseline

December 14, 2010 by Scott Spangler

Customer service, as the AOPA student retention survey recently reaffirmed, plays an important role in the student pilot dropout rate. As anyone who has called or visited more than one flight school can attest, the quality of customer service—good, bad, or mediocre—depends on the school’s owner.

Over the past couple of decades I’ve visited more than a few of the 270 Cessna Pilot Centers and found their service predictably positive. This didn’t happen by accident, says CPC Manager Julie Filucci. Cessna launched its flight school network in 1973. Since then it has assessed the practices of its more successful affiliates and shared the accumulated knowledge through various training programs.

A critical component is “delivering a customer experience commensurate” with the other services Cessna provides, she continues. “As the primary point of contact with students,” to CPC customers, “flight instructors are the face of Cessna.” To ensure that CFIs put their best face forward, they each receive training that sets a how-to baseline and establishes “the core customer experience.”

Understanding how flight schools compete, Filucci’s predecessors focused on “a few key areas that we knew were differentiators.” Early on, the training was face-to-face, but it is now delivered by a 15-minute video, Checklist for Success.

Fixing Flight Training: the FT-IEP

December 6, 2010 by Scott Spangler

Introduced in Fixing Flight Training: What You Can Do Now!, the flight training individual education plan, or FT-IEP, can be initiated by students, instructors, or flight schools. It has the potential to alleviate three of the four dropout motivators identified by the AOPA survey: poor educational quality, poor information sharing, and poor customer focus. A binding contract, it itemizes every aspect of training, from who’s responsible for what, and the consequences for falling short of those responsibilities.

It need not be a complicated document. Start with the educational goal: name the certificate and/or rating desired by the student. Then itemize how the team of student, teacher, and school will measure the achievement of that goal. The appropriate FAA Practical Test Standards seems appropriate.

The educational plan is the curriculum that plots the route to the goal. During the FT-IEP meeting, attended by the student, teacher, and school, go through every step of it from first flight to test prep to checkride. Ideally, progress should be proficiency based, so students will move to the next lesson once they have demonstrated consistent ability. Lesson plans include the methods and criteria used to make those measurements.

The lesson plans that build the curriculum should be specific, covering everything from homework to pre- and post-lesson briefings and the necessary resources such as ground school courses and materials, classrooms, training aids, simulators, and training aircraft. Somehow the FT-IEP should specify the consequences for any member of the educational team who comes unprepared. Because cost is an undeniable factor in learning to fly, this seems a good option.