Pilot Population

Bragging Rights & The Future of Flight

September 8, 2012 by Scott Spangler

Here in Wisconsin, a swing state, we have been incessantly pummeled by political ads of both parties. This onslaught has been painfully punctuated almost daily by political surveys whose questions do little more than support the delusions of the person who paid for it. Add two weeks of intellectual drown proofing in the tsunami of lies and half-truths taken out of context that emanated from the thankfully ended conventions, and it’s hard to have a good mental outlook about anything, let alone aviation.

Try as I might, I could not escape the tentacles of cynical aviation apathy, the feeling that there was no place in aviation for people like me. This metaphysical predator ambushed me in, of all places, the travel section of the New York Times. The headline says it all: Space Tourism is Here! Wealthy Adventurers Wanted.

Reading about all the ways rich people can get into space was interesting. Yes, there’s some training involved, but in the article it seemed secondary to wining and dining with their economic peers at something akin to an aerospace spa. In the end, what matters more than acquiring a skill is the bragging rights, which is what they are really paying for.

What pulled me under was the realization that, for the most part, rich people don’t invest the time and effort needed to truly accomplish something hard, like climbing Mount Everest or flying a plane. They hire someone to take them there by the hand or in the back seat. This confirmed a dark notion that’s been lurking in my subconscious, unless we revive the middle class and restore the economic vigor it exercised three or four decades ago, general aviation as we’ve known it is doomed.

Finally, a New Take on Flight Schools

August 14, 2012 by Scott Spangler

Discussing the dismal number of student starts in the 1990s, my Flight Training magazine coworkers and I wondered how flight schools located where the nonflying public congregate, like shopping malls, might fare. Learning about two new aviation education efforts at EAA AirVenture 2012, we’re about to find out.

Zulu Flight Training, a subsidiary of Continental Motors, just opened in a mall in Spanish Fort, Alabama, not far from Mobile. Its partner in the program is Redbird Flight Simulations, which provides the latest in advanced, full-motion simulators. Whether pursuing their private pilot certificate or instrument or multiengine ratings, students will be introduced to—and practice—all key flight skills in the sim before getting into an airplane.

With ground and simulator school conveniently located, students are more likely to show up for lessons. “Our goal is to provide a consistent, structured and stress free environment at a set price to help people obtain their pilot’s license whether it is for a career or pleasure,” said Zulu Chairman Rhett Ross. That includes full disclosure of all course offerings and services to ensure that the curriculum or price never surprises students.

Zulu also offers proficiency training, and other pilot courses will be announced in the coming months, Ross said. As the pilot location proves itself and resolves inevitable kinks, Zulu will expand to other locations around the country. To help celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Piper Cub, Redbird simulated it with motion. It’s been awhile since I flew a Cub, but its response was spooky accurate. All it really needed to complete the simulation was a fan-blown slipstream through an open door.

Is Silence a Symptom of Aviation Atrophy?

June 18, 2012 by Scott Spangler

With no demands or duties, I retired to the deck on Father’s Day to reflect on my life’s journey, to appreciate the good times and bad that are its waypoints. A caressing breeze ebbed and flowed from the west like wind waves on the sky’s shoreline as I stared absently at an unseen stylus scribing a chalky white arc of vapor across a cloudless blueboard at 35,000 feet.

The songbirds uninterrupted medley almost drowned out the muted road noise, civilization’s inescapable tinnitus. It wasn’t until the Cessna 182, which resides on Omro’s eastern limit at Skydive Adventure, buzzed determinedly skyward that I realized that of all the places I’ve lived, this small town of 3,000 is infrequently below flying machines of all types.

Your perspective will assess this odd or not, but it seems incongruous because Omro is roughly 10 miles west of Oshkosh’s Wittman Regional Airport, home of the world’s busiest control tower, and during that one week of EAA AirVenture, the sky over Omro is, indeed, alive with airplanes. But over the intervening 51 weeks, it’s pretty quiet.

I wonder, is this silence a symptom of aviation atrophy, an industry contracting through lack of use, time, money, interest, or all of the above? Or is it a fluke of location?

What’s Aviation’s Future in a Polarized World?

April 20, 2012 by Scott Spangler

WATS 2012 At the World Aviation Training Symposium, held last week in Orlando, Boeing’s chief test & evaluation pilot for new airplane development, Mike Carriker, said the industry must modernize its educational methods and technology if it hopes to prepare pilots and technicians to “maximize the capabilities of today’s high technology airplanes.”

While aircraft and teaching technology have “evolved exponentially” over the past half century, aviation training has not progressed beyond the rote regurgitation of knowledge and skills that satisfy disassociated evaluation tasks. Few will disagree with his assessment that the industry must now employ modern methods and technology in competency-based training not only to make the global transportation efficient and economical, but “to reestablish the aviation industry as an attractive career option.”

Given our entrenched political, economic, and social polarization, there is little or no chance that the industry will make this needed transition. It matters little that, according to Boeing’s annual Pilot & Technician Outlook, that we must educate a million new pilots and technicians in the next 20 years. In the zero-sum game that is modern life, ideological preeminence is more than the common good.

Challenge Notes Importance of Flight Time

April 15, 2012 by Scott Spangler

For decades, individuals and organizations have focused attention and effort on rebuilding the pilot population. But for the first time in memory, AOPA is drawing attention to—and doing something about it with its Keep ’em Flying Challenge—an equally important number: hours flown. And it asks pilots to push themselves beyond the hundred-buck burger run.

Like the pilot population, the hours flown by GA and Part 135 pilots has been in bumpy decline since 1980, when they logged more than 41 million hours. In 1990 it was 32 million; in 2000 it was 29.9 million; and in 2010 is was 24.8 million hours, up from 23.7 the year before.

AOPA elegantly shares the wealth and benefits of getting airborne and motivates participation with a random drawing that will award a $2,499 grand prize, $1,000 to second place, $500 to third place, and four $250 fourth-place awards.

There’s one entry per pilot, and qualification is on the honor system. Between April 1 and July 31, 2012, pilots must fly at least five hours as pilot in command of an aircraft to five destination airports more than 50 nautical miles away, and complete an Air Safety Institute online course.

That sounds like more fun than the prosaic burger mission to the same old airports. Aviation is about adventure, so add your own challenge. Fly to five never-before visited airports or seek all available runway options: grass, gravel, asphalt, and concrete, short and soft, wide and narrow.

And don’t forget to invite your friends. Making your challenge a social event with passengers (prospective or lapsed pilots you may know) and more than one airplane adds to the fun! Let me know what personal challenge you come up with, because flying is also about sharing. — Scott Spangler

Technorati Tags: AOPA,AOPA Air Safety Foundation,Pilot Population,Flight Time,Cross-Country Flight

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