Flight Training

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?

Cessna Gives Students an Elegant GIFT

April 6, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Feedback, information on what students have done correctly, where they need work, and how to make the necessary improvements, is key to any educational program. Its quality and value depends on a flight instructor’s ability to immediately measure performance against quantifiable standards and articulate specific corrections the student can act on.

Providing it in flight is an unappreciated challenge because CFIs must, at the same time, ensure safety by maintaining situational awareness, keeping track of traffic, and communicating, as necessary, with ATC. Instructors are better able to focus on student performance in a simulator, but they must still be present, which is why Cessna’s new Guided Independent Flight Training program, developed with King Schools and Redbird Flight Simulation, is a gift to student pilots.

Available exclusively at Cessna Pilot Centers, GIFT covers all private pilot maneuvers, from steep turns and traffic pattern entries to short field takeoffs and landings. Students will not need to schedule an instructor for simulator sessions. John or Martha King teach each maneuver, demonstrating it from different video viewpoints on the sim’s visual display. As they practice the maneuver, the program provides feedback by measuring their performance again Practical Test Standard parameters.

GIFT does not replace instructors, it augments the time students spend with them in flight. Students, says CPC Manager Julie Filucci, “get the benefit of lessons on specific maneuvers…and are able to fly them as many times as they wish, allowing them to perfect [thanks to immediate feedback] their aircraft handling skills at their own pace in the low-cost environment of a simulator.” And the innovation doesn’t end here.

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

Technorati Tags: CFI,Flight Schools,Flight Training,The Savvy Flight Intructor,Greg Brown,Flight Training magazine

Winter Callback: What Would You Do?

January 12, 2011 by Scott Spangler

Immediate gratification is one of my guilty pleasures, especially when it comes to the interactive editions of Callback, the online publication of NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. And there is some pilot ego involved as well, a chance to feel quietly superior—or stupid—depending on the decision you make.

It works like this. Callback gives you three situations, with at least one from airline and general aviation operations. Each are real, derived from the NASA report filed by the pilot involved. After you read the situation you pick one of four choices then click the “What would you have done?” link to see what the reporting pilot did.

I like the airline situations because it gives me a Walter Mitty moment in another pilot’s shoes. I got two chances to play in this issue. In the first situation I was flying an MD-80 on an ILS through a 500-foot overcast, heavy rain, and a microburst alert as he passed through 2,000 feet. The problem? The left throttle would not reduce the engine’s power beyond half speed ahead. The captain and I did the same thing: divert.

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