Student Pilot Retention Archives

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.

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.