Pilot Dropouts

Flying Club May Resuscitate Flying Career

February 8, 2012 by Scott Spangler

CLEAR!

TV doctors bark this sharp-elbowed warning before they shock a restive heart back to a regular rhythm. It is also the warning pilots issue to bystanders before they energize an airplane’s air processer. Seemingly disassociated warnings, several days ago the Winnebago Flying Club united them by offering to resuscitate my flat-lined flying career and increase the active pilot population by one. (Hey, every one counts these days.)

Like uncounted thousands of pilots of my generation, I surrendered the left seat in the past decade because there just wasn’t enough money left at month’s end to pursue something I do for fun. Family obligations, like food and a warm, dry place to live, and two kids in college, with child support on top of tuition, books, and board, have first dibs on an unpredictable freelance income.

Counting the days to their graduation coincides with my 60th birthday and the financial preparations that will sustain me in my dotage. A realist, I was resigned to spend the rest of my life on the ground and looking up whenever an airplane flew overhead. When I learned that the flying club was accepting new members, looking at the numbers made my heart jump.

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.

Aviation Has the CFIs it Deserves

November 13, 2010 by Scott Spangler

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.