AOPA Aviation Summit Archives

In the overwhelming number of comments to last week’s Aviation Has the CFIs it Deserves, pilots, instructors, and flight school owners clearly confirmed the veracity of AOPA’s survey that identified the leading causes of aviation’s 80-percent dropout rate. You can file the majority of their shared experiences under poor educational quality, poor customer focus, poor information sharing, and (just once) poor community.

The pressing question now, however, is: What are we going to do about this, who is going to do it, and when are we going to take action? Timing is critical because this may well be our last chance to give aviation a future. As the American plutocracy soaks up what remains of the income the rest of us still earn, the pool of potential pilots with the resources to see training through to certification continues to evaporate. Our only hope is to seal every leak in the sustaining pilot pipeline.

Acting on its survey results, AOPA’s first step will be giving new life to Flight School Business News (aka FSBN, pronounced fizz-bin). AOPA Publications is now evaluating its medium and content, said Jennifer Storm, director of public relations and leader of AOPA’s Flight Training Student Retention Initiative. (She is uniquely qualified, an active CFI with a master’s degree in education, majoring in instructional design and online learning.) Right now it seems the publication will be digital and descriptive, with face-to-face forums at major aviation events.

For the unfamiliar, FSBN was conceived in the early 1990s, when we at Flight Training magazine realized that flight school operators were pilots with insufficient knowledge of essential business practices. We attempted to fill in the blanks with prescriptive how-to articles and descriptive snapshots of other school’s successful practices in a monthly 8-to-16 page newsletter. It was well received by the 1,000 or schools that received it, but given the dropout rate and AOPA survey results, it would safe to assume that few schools acted on the information it provided.

Called with the dawn of Veteran’s Day to substitute for a middle school special education teacher, I missed the online AOPA Aviation Summit presentation that conveyed the results of its survey of flight training dropouts. I haven’t found the archived video, but I did find a couple of releases that provided some the the information I’ve been waiting for.

Many in the industry, it seems, were surprised that the cost of flying, while a factor, isn’t the primary reason 80 percent of students quit before receiving their certificates. According to AOPA Convenes Major Flight Training Summit, students quit because of poor educational quality, poor customer focus, poor community, and poor information sharing.

In the AOPA Online Newsroom, AOPA Convenes Flight Training Summit provides more specifics. The research’s 47 statistically valid attributes fell into “11 discrete factors that affect the student pilot experience. Five of the 11 are directly related to educational quality with respect to both individual instructor effectiveness and flight school support for and management of instructors: effective instruction; organized lessons; flight school policies that support and maximize instructor effectiveness; providing additional resources; and test preparation.”

In other words, it’s the teacher’s fault, just as it is in public schools when students don’t meet expectations set by politicians and other experts. This should not surprise anyone on either side of the airport fence because in the pantheon of professions, Americans behold teachers with stratospheric disregard. Unappreciated with over work, low pay, and responsibility without support or authority, we have the teachers we deserve.