Student Pilots

Redbird Migration Looks Back at the Future of Flight Training

October 23, 2017 by Scott Spangler

For the past six years, Redbird, which has developed a family of aviation training devices, has sponsored a flight-training symposium attended by a hundred or more of the land’s leading aviation educators. Known as the Redbird Migration, in the past this flock congregated at Redbird’s roost in Texas. For its seventh season, it met in Oshkosh, hosted by EAA.

For many of the participants, it was their first time in Oshkosh outside of EAA AirVenture, and the dearth of aircraft, people, and traffic disoriented them. Fortunately, Sean D. Tucker, the keynote speaker at the opening dinner on Monday, October 16, helped acclimate them. And talking with the educators reacclimated me with a community I was once intimately a part of, which I found disorienting.

On one hand, they were exuberant about the future. With the airlines hiring and the entry-level positions now paying almost enough for students to repay their loans and put a roof over their head and food in the bellies, enrollments in their training courses was growing. And new and evolving technology (like a Redbird sim) enabled schools to make the most of their customers’ time and money.

At the same time, however, this migration was, for me, a groundhog day. Like the background soundtrack that provides continuity to a movie, the flight school educators discussed the same problems we were talking about nearly 30 years ago.

Young Eagles Flight: It Only Takes One Spark

August 23, 2017 by Robert Mark

By Jennifer Adams, Guest Writer

A love of aviation is often passed down through families from one generation to the next. Such was not the case for me. In fact, my passion for things with wings has usually been viewed by my family with an air of exasperated patience. “Don’t mind her – she likes airplanes.” This has not stopped me, however, from trying to encourage my kids to become interested in aviation, and a Young Eagles flight was a key.

If you read my previous story, then you know that after dragging my daughter, Cici, to numerous aviation events, it finally dawned on me to just ask if she’d like to go for a flight. To my delight her answer was a resounding yes. We had to wait until June when a local EAA chapter scheduled a Young Eagles flight near us. It was with a fair bit of excitement (OK, mostly on my part) that we headed to a nearby GA airport one sunny Saturday morning. Having never attended a Young Eagles event before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was quite surprised and pleased to see the large number of families already waiting when we arrived. [Read more…] about Young Eagles Flight: It Only Takes One Spark

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.

Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry?

May 4, 2015 by Robert Mark

Jetwhine

Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry?

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Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry?

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I knew we had a lot of landing areas here in the United States … but 19,315 according to the FAA? Wow. That number is of course broken down into traditional airports, heliports, seaplane bases.

No matter what you call them or what they look like, they all have one thing in common. They represent a place where airplanes, helicopters and seaplanes come home to roost from time to time.

Some of those airports represent much more of an opportunity to me than simply as landing areas though.

The aviation industry is still suffering from an economic recession of sorts.

In the early 1980s, we produced 15,000 piston aircraft. Last year we produced 1,328. In the 1990s we had over 700,000 pilots on the FAA register. Today that numbers in the high 500,000s.

Student pilot starts are down from the old days too with nearly 7 in 10 students quitting long before they ever earn a pilot certificate. Aircraft maintenance technician numbers have been flat since 1990, which equates to zero growth. Worst of all, 75% of the AMTs today are over the age of 50.

As an industry, our ship has been taking on water for sometime despite a number of conscientious initiatives to increase the pilot, mechanic and airplane supply, most of which haven’t moved the needle much.

If we don’t figure out a way to start bringing new blood into the industry soon, there won’t be enough people to fly the airplanes we build, or fix them, or service them at those thousands of U.S. airports.

The question is how to fix the problem we all know about, but that many people still seem to believe is someone else’s problem?

Rather than another national initiative, what if we focused our triage efforts locally … at our neighborhood airport? When people think of learning to fly, they go to the airport. If they want to buy a plane they often visit the airport first. When they need one fixed, or they want a hangar, they head to the airport.

This is where I think airport managers can help. Traditionally, they focus on keeping the airport alive with solid pavement, newly mown grass and runway lights that work … all very necessary tasks. But marketing the industry is not something airport people normally think about. [Read more…] about Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry?

Pitch & Power and the Margin of Error

December 10, 2011 by Scott Spangler

A recent issue of AOPA’s Flight School Business included this story: FAA Updates CFI Renewal Clinic Guidelines. It referenced the updated advisory circular that covers FIRCs and noted that the FAA added angle of attack (AoA) to the list of core subjects the renewal clinic must address.

That should be interesting because angle of attack is the root of an enduring aviation debate that correlates pitch & power with altitude & airspeed. This requirement will certainly lead to some spirited discussions and diagrams at FIRCs nationwide, but what was behind its addition?

The answer was in Appendix 1 of AC 61-83G, under Item 5: Safety Trends in GA: How CFIs Can Directly Contribute to Aviation Safety. To summarize, the non-commercial, non-corporate general aviation accident rate has been trending lower over the past two decades. To continue that trend, the FAA added A0A because it’s related to seven of the top 10 ways pilots kill themselves—low altitude maneuvering and loss of control.

Everyone involved has done an admirable job in making aviation safer, and the low rate we’ve had for decades suggests that it is the margin of error. In statistics I learned that this margin is an unavoidable fact of life. My prof said it grows as the data pool shrinks, so it makes sense that the accident rate—aviation’s margin of error—is up a tick. The shrinking pilot population is flying fewer hours. Explaining the statistical version of a pilot-induced oscillation, the prof also said trying to eliminate the margin usually makes it worse.