Fixing Flight Training: What You Can Do Now!

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.

FSBN succumbed shortly after AOPA bought Flight Training in 1999. As one of my editorial offspring, I’m thrilled that it is rejoining the fight. But, as its past performance suggests, we cannot rely on it or any other “mass market” effort. Each of us—that means you, dear reader—have to make a sustained individual effort to effect change from the inside out and bottom up. Whether you are a pilot, instructor, or school owner, you need to stand up, speak up—and act to make sure every student who starts training finishes training.

How you do this depends on the situation and circumstances you face. There is no universal panacea, but there is a tool from the other side of the airport fence that might help. It’s called the Individual Education Plan, or IEP. It is designed to meet the unique educational needs of a single student. Fundamentally, it is a contract between the school/teacher and student/parents that covers every aspect of their respective educational responsibilities.

In public school, IEPs are generally reserved for students suffering some physical, emotional, or educational disability. By law, schools must lead their creation. That is not aviation’s problem, so there is no reason why a student, instructor, or flight school operator could not initiate the creation a flight training individual education plan, an FT-IEP that would clearly spell out the responsibilities of each party—and the consequences of not meeting them—as they work together on a specific plan to achieve the stated goal: a pilot’s certificate.

This requires work. But isn’t the future of aviation worth the effort? Missing here are members of that prospective pilot pool. If you deem this idea worthy, pass it along to all who mention a passing interest in learning to fly. It is important that they know about the challenges they face, so an off-putting surprise won’t scare them off. And they need to know what they can do to alleviate those problems, such as devoting a day to the creation of a binding FT-IEP. I’ll delve into the specifics in my next post. — Scott Spangler