CFI

CFIs Need Career Situational Awareness

May 9, 2012 by Scott Spangler

Last week, the middle school where I am a substitute teacher held its annual career and hobby day, where students sign up for presentations that interest them. I was on duty as a student wrangler, not a speaker, and it was happenstance that I ended up with 35 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders interested in aviation.

The presenters were two young flight instructors from a nearby collegiate aviation program. When a non-flying person needs an expert, a CFI is the first choice because being a pilot is something most non-flyers understand, and who best to speak about them than those who teach them to fly. Unfortunately, public speaking, like customer service and sales, is not part of the CFI practical test standards.

Consequently, the kids quickly grew bored with the unpracticed, myopic presentation that rarely strayed far from the presenters’ aviation goals. In fairness, I don’t know how much warning they had about this speaking gig, and they tried their best, but it was a missed opportunity because of a poor situational awareness of aviation careers beyond their airline and corporate aspirations.

My point is that opportunities to get non-flyers excited about professional and recreational aviation to non-flyers of all ages are rare. In most cases, flight instructors are the go-to last-minute speaker. So why not have a presentation, supported with a PowerPoint presentation, on a flash drive? And why not practice it once, so you’re ready for last-minute calls.

Putting together such a presentation is no harder than a lesson plan. All it takes is a little bit of time, accepting that there’s more to aviation than the career carrot you happen to be pursuing, and an Internet connection. Before you start, you should know two things: Who is your audience, and what is the desired focus, professional or recreational flying?

Pitch & Power and the Margin of Error

December 10, 2011 by Scott Spangler

A recent issue of AOPA’s Flight School Business included this story: FAA Updates CFI Renewal Clinic Guidelines. It referenced the updated advisory circular that covers FIRCs and noted that the FAA added angle of attack (AoA) to the list of core subjects the renewal clinic must address.

That should be interesting because angle of attack is the root of an enduring aviation debate that correlates pitch & power with altitude & airspeed. This requirement will certainly lead to some spirited discussions and diagrams at FIRCs nationwide, but what was behind its addition?

The answer was in Appendix 1 of AC 61-83G, under Item 5: Safety Trends in GA: How CFIs Can Directly Contribute to Aviation Safety. To summarize, the non-commercial, non-corporate general aviation accident rate has been trending lower over the past two decades. To continue that trend, the FAA added A0A because it’s related to seven of the top 10 ways pilots kill themselves—low altitude maneuvering and loss of control.

Everyone involved has done an admirable job in making aviation safer, and the low rate we’ve had for decades suggests that it is the margin of error. In statistics I learned that this margin is an unavoidable fact of life. My prof said it grows as the data pool shrinks, so it makes sense that the accident rate—aviation’s margin of error—is up a tick. The shrinking pilot population is flying fewer hours. Explaining the statistical version of a pilot-induced oscillation, the prof also said trying to eliminate the margin usually makes it worse.

A Budding CFI, a New Writer

November 2, 2011 by Robert Mark

Editor Note: At least a couple of times each week, someone sends an unsolicited story trying to convince us to publish it. More often than not, the material simply doesn’t fit. It’s either too long, too sales focused or – as happened today in fact – completely inappropriate ( they wanted us to run a story about dental hygiene).

When I first heard from today’s author – Travis Bedwell – he didn’t try to suggest I publish anything actually. He merely wanted to know how I got started as a writer. Clever guy this Travis.

My break as a writer, in fact, came from a guy many of you might never have heard of, former Flying Magazine senior editor Gordon Baxter.

During the course of a couple of e-mails with Travis, I realized he was a passionate aviator (training for his CFI at Southern Illinois University) with some solid reasoning behind his current flying options. But I also noticed he possessed a talent for putting words together. In the end I asked him to offer Jetwhine readers a few insights into the world of learning to fly from the right seat.

Without further ado, may I present Travis Bedwell, a young man I hope we’ll hear more from over the next few years.

Rob Mark, publisher

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“Left rudder, left rudder” says my flight instructor as I manage to touch our Cutlass down on the right main wheel first (Note to self: next time touch down on both mains at the same time for a smooth landing).

It doesn’t seem that flying in the right seat should be any different than the left, despite the fact that those instruments that I’ve been staring at for my entire flying career are gone. However, acquiring the skills and traits required to be a certificated flight instructor is the greatest challenge that I have encountered in my flight training.

I chose to pursue CFI training because I want to share my love of flying with others. Some of my colleagues are bypassing the flight instructor route and obtaining more multi engine time hoping to go to a regional carrier. I love flying twins, but that time and place will come later for me. I want to instruct not only to share my passion of aviation, but to become a better pilot as well.

Like any other flight rating, I have ground and flight lessons. The majority of my ground time consists of me teaching for an hour and a half with a thirty-minute debrief; it’s a brutal 90 minutes. Trying to explain topics, such as aerodynamics and weather theory, give a new meaning to migraines. To add to the challenge, my instructor makes me explain the same topic using a variety of methods and visual aids before moving on. Although I shoot him a dirty look, I know that his reasoning is solid. [Read more…] about A Budding CFI, a New Writer

North Dakota Aviation: Front Door to Growth

September 25, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Lately there hasn’t been much good news about aviation, general or otherwise. Then I went to North Dakota for a story on a one-tech avionics shop halfway between Fargo and Bismarck. A flight school was setting up in the next hangar, an indicator of better times at the airport, said Greg Earnest at Jamestown Avionics, because new pilots mean more airplanes. In passing, he mentioned the state’s Flight Training Assistance Program, which defrays the cost of bringing a CFI to airports where none live.

Say what?

Greg aimed me at the North Dakota Aeronautics Commission. Its website was as open, friendly, helpful, and positive as the people I’d so far met in Jamestown. “The state aviation system is an attractive front door to our state’s economic growth,” reads the first sentence of the commission’s philosophy. Here’s the rest of it: “To ensure this growth, the system needs continual enhancement with state-of-the-art technology. With this goal, continued flexibility and responsiveness by the Aeronautics Commission will fulfill the needs of the aviation community.”

Which brings us back to the flight training program. Keeping track of FAA pilot statistics, the commission decided to do something about the declining pilot population in the state—down 22 percent, from 4,095 to 3,207 over the past 30 years. Its analysis revealed a disproportional decline between rural and urban areas, in part attributed to the dearth of CFIs at rural areas. North Dakota law says that the commission shall cooperate with towns to develop and coordinate aviation activities, this includes educational grants, i.e. the Flight Training Assistance Program.

Can Organizing CFIs Help Aviation’s Future?

February 16, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Flight instructor pay and benefits are an integral component in creating a flight school faculty that reliably provides an education consistent with the investment made by the students they serve. Unfortunately, flight training is at the bitter end of the professional aviation economic food chain so a CFI’s only hope of making a living wage is advancing several links up the chain, after paying his or her requisite dues.

In labor history, many trades and professions have bargained for better pay, benefits, and working conditions by organizing. Airline pilots were among the first to achieve success in this effort. In the ongoing discussion about the declining pilot population and uneven quality of flight training in America today, several readers have suggested that CFIs might follow suit, inferring that such action might lead to improvement.

Plugging “flight instructor + union” into Google led me to the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM). It has 720,000 members, but no one could tell me how many CFIs were among its 150,000 aerospace workers. Searching IAM’s news archive revealed that Airline Training Center CFIs had recently negotiated a new contract with the Lufthansa school in Arizona, and work to merge Continental’s ground instructors with their unionized brethren at United was ongoing.

Sifting through decades of Google News for reports of organizing flight instructors returned no joy. It seems clear that organizing under a union’s banner can and has worked at a few training institutions, but joining a union to improve their lot is an idea instructors rarely consider. Why is anybody’s guess. Organizing takes some time and effort, and my estimate is that few CFIs teach long enough to see the process through.

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