Flight Schools

AOPA FTSRI Offers Hope for GA’s Future

August 26, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Given its more than half century of tradition unimpeded by progress, I’ve always been cynical about the future of general aviation and its life’s blood, the flight training industry that educates new pilots. Then I attended the next-to-last regional meeting of the AOPA Flight Training Student Retention Initiative (FTSRI), held August 23 at the Hilton Garden Inn across the street from the Chicago-DuPage Airport. It offset my cynicism to the point where I think they have a 50-50 chance of making a difference.

The 2.5-hour meeting got off to a good start. About 50 people registered for the gathering, and 40 of them showed up. Disbursed at 10 tables, before the break I sat with three student pilots and a new private pilot. During the break, Jennifer Storm, who leads FTSRI, asked if I would relocate to even out a table occupied by a CFI, a student pilot, and a new private. Another gathering, which I did not attend, would be held the next day for CFIs and flight school operators, she said.

Both regional meetings operated with the same rules: Focus on what we can do, not what’s wrong. Yeah, I’ve heard that before, but the well structured and led program pulled it off! Before a break at the hour mark, Storm PowerPointed AOPA’s research findings (see The Flight Training Experience: A survey of students, pilots, and instructors). Afterwards, each table would achieve consensus on a pertinent retention attribute and propose a workable solution. With each shared solution, and news of AOPA efforts in beta test, a dory of hope started to float on my ocean of cynicism.

Who Knew: 60-Month Student Pilot Ticket?

June 26, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Am I the only one who missed the news in July 2010 that the FAA nearly doubled the life of a student pilot certificate (and the third-class medical certificate) for those 40 and younger, from 36 months to 60 months?

This discovery came with a question from JetWhine Publisher Rob Mark. He sent a link to the FAA Certificated Pilots 1929-2011 page on the AOPA website and asked, “Something weird about student starts here. Are they adding them all together?”

The table showed 72,280 active student tickets in 2009 and 119,119 in 2010, with an estimated 115,000 in 2011. The fine print told of the ticket’s new lifespan and said it was behind the significant increase in the student number. At first glance it seems like good news, until you see the 4,119 decline in the 2011 student estimate.

A more accurate—and telling—number is found on the FAA website, on Table 17 of the US Civil Airmen Statistics: Original Airmen Certificates Issued 2001-2010, a section of which is shown above. Original certificates issued is aviation’s birthrate, the number of newborn pilots joining the family. Look at the number of student, recreational, sport, and private tickets issued. The story they tell is not good for aviation’s future. Given the economy, anyone want to guess what the 2011 numbers will look like?

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.

Savvy Flight Instructor Now Flies a Kindle

January 20, 2011 by Scott Spangler

sfi_std Not long ago I received an e-mail from Greg Brown, one of the many friends made during my time at Flight Training magazine (and Greg, the 2000 CFI of the Year, still writes his popular “Flying Carpet” column for it.)

It was a short note to let me know that his excellent book, The Savvy Flight Instructor: Secrets for the Successful CFI was now available on Kindle. Happy for my friend, I immediately started kicking myself because his book, which is all about the business side of flight instruction, getting new students—and keeping them flying—was the perfect answer for those seeking specifics in the many comments to Aviation has the CFIs is Deserves, Fixing Flight Training: What You Can do Now!, and CPC Training Sets Customer Service Baseline.

By meeting the FAA’s requirements for the certificate, flight instructors are only half trained. All they possess are the operational knowledge and skills defined by the practical test standards and taught by the FAA handbooks on instructing and applicable flying machines.

But CFIs don’t survive by flying alone. Whether they are on a flight school faculty or an independent, they only exist and prosper as whole instructors who exercise effective business practices daily. Among the the 14 chapters on the book’s table of contents are Where do New Student Come From?, Converting Prospects into Flight Students, Keeping Your Students Flying, and The Business of Flight Instructing.

So, if you’re an instructor, or know one interested in completing his or her education, get a copy of The Savvy Flight Instructor. Published by ASA, it’s $19.95 in paper and $9.99 as a Kindle download. And if if CFIs want to make an individual effort to help general aviation recover from its death spiral of public apathy, actually read the book—and put what it teaches into practice. — Scott

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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.

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