Student Pilot Dropouts

The Few. The Proud. The New Student Pilots

February 27, 2017 by Scott Spangler

On the road to our favorite brewpub for date night I noticed a new billboard for the U.S. Marine Corps: “We don’t accept applications. Only commitments.” The smallest member of America’s armed forces, it meets its recruitment goals by challenging volunteers to meet the Corps’ uncompromising standards. In other words: Not everyone can be a Marine. Becoming one is not easy. Do you have what it takes? Can you sustain your commitment when the rigorous training seems beyond your capabilities? Reflecting on my experience with the Corps during my naval service and after it, the Marines steadfast challenge to meet its standards might work equally well in recruiting new student pilots.

As the declining trend of student pilot starts suggests, and the roughly 80 percent who decide to pursue a less challenging activity before they solo or earn a certificate confirms, becoming a pilot is not for everyone. History suggests that making the training easier by eliminating its more challenging aspects—spin training and the recent amendment of how to teach slow flight come to mind—perhaps taking a lesson from the Marines will reduce the number who quit before certification. And in the process it might improve efforts to reduce accidents resulting from loss of control.

Posing this challenge will affect students and their instructors because the latter will have to change the way they teach.

Teaching maneuvers separately and with a rote by-the-numbers setup and recovery does not prepare students for real world situations. There are certainly many ways to accomplish this, and I had the good fortune to fly with teachers who employed several of them. One of the most effective was to discuss a situation on the ground, say a spin resulting from an uncoordinated turn from base to final, and then to make the point in the airplane. What made it effective was the true point of the teacher’s demonstration.

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.

Fixing Flight Training: the FT-IEP

December 6, 2010 by Scott Spangler

Introduced in Fixing Flight Training: What You Can Do Now!, the flight training individual education plan, or FT-IEP, can be initiated by students, instructors, or flight schools. It has the potential to alleviate three of the four dropout motivators identified by the AOPA survey: poor educational quality, poor information sharing, and poor customer focus. A binding contract, it itemizes every aspect of training, from who’s responsible for what, and the consequences for falling short of those responsibilities.

It need not be a complicated document. Start with the educational goal: name the certificate and/or rating desired by the student. Then itemize how the team of student, teacher, and school will measure the achievement of that goal. The appropriate FAA Practical Test Standards seems appropriate.

The educational plan is the curriculum that plots the route to the goal. During the FT-IEP meeting, attended by the student, teacher, and school, go through every step of it from first flight to test prep to checkride. Ideally, progress should be proficiency based, so students will move to the next lesson once they have demonstrated consistent ability. Lesson plans include the methods and criteria used to make those measurements.

The lesson plans that build the curriculum should be specific, covering everything from homework to pre- and post-lesson briefings and the necessary resources such as ground school courses and materials, classrooms, training aids, simulators, and training aircraft. Somehow the FT-IEP should specify the consequences for any member of the educational team who comes unprepared. Because cost is an undeniable factor in learning to fly, this seems a good option.

Fixing Flight Training: What You Can Do Now!

December 2, 2010 by Scott Spangler

In the overwhelming number of comments to last week’s Aviation Has the CFIs it Deserves, pilots, instructors, and flight school owners clearly confirmed the veracity of AOPA’s survey that identified the leading causes of aviation’s 80-percent dropout rate. You can file the majority of their shared experiences under poor educational quality, poor customer focus, poor information sharing, and (just once) poor community.

The pressing question now, however, is: What are we going to do about this, who is going to do it, and when are we going to take action? Timing is critical because this may well be our last chance to give aviation a future. As the American plutocracy soaks up what remains of the income the rest of us still earn, the pool of potential pilots with the resources to see training through to certification continues to evaporate. Our only hope is to seal every leak in the sustaining pilot pipeline.

Acting on its survey results, AOPA’s first step will be giving new life to Flight School Business News (aka FSBN, pronounced fizz-bin). AOPA Publications is now evaluating its medium and content, said Jennifer Storm, director of public relations and leader of AOPA’s Flight Training Student Retention Initiative. (She is uniquely qualified, an active CFI with a master’s degree in education, majoring in instructional design and online learning.) Right now it seems the publication will be digital and descriptive, with face-to-face forums at major aviation events.

For the unfamiliar, FSBN was conceived in the early 1990s, when we at Flight Training magazine realized that flight school operators were pilots with insufficient knowledge of essential business practices. We attempted to fill in the blanks with prescriptive how-to articles and descriptive snapshots of other school’s successful practices in a monthly 8-to-16 page newsletter. It was well received by the 1,000 or schools that received it, but given the dropout rate and AOPA survey results, it would safe to assume that few schools acted on the information it provided.