Flight Training’s Future Needs Unified Plan

When it comes to the future of flight training in America, I have some good news, and some not so good news. The good news is that given the attendance at the panel discussion of this subject, held the Saturday of EAA AirVenture, flight instructors care. Of the roughly 80 folks in the audience, a show of hands revealed that all but a few were CFIs.

The not so good news is that while the five-member panel (including yours truly) accurately itemized the challenges flight training now faces, the  solutions were but ideas scattered like seeds. But perhaps the panel’s indirect agreement on those challenges  will create an environment in which those idea seeds can grow.

With me on the panel were Russ Still of Online Ground School; Kent Lovelace, who leads the John D. Odegard School of Aeronautics at the University of North Dakota; Eric Radtke, president of Sporty’s Academy; and NAFI Executive Director Jason Blair. In our own words, we all agreed that becoming a pilot is no longer a popular option today, which calls for a business model optimized for a niche rather than a mass market. As Still said, the old model of “getting a building, putting out a sign, and waiting for people to walk through the door clearly doesn’t work any more.”

The moderator, NAFI Mentor Editor Greg Laslo, asked what can be done to reduce training costs. Seating order put me up first, and my answer was a simple and honest “nothing.” Everything costs more today—insurance, gas and oil, maintenance, and personnel costs—and you can’t roll back the clock. Indirectly, the others agreed. The said components like ground school options and simulator use can mitigate the cost, but nothing will substantially reduce it. Financing is needed, especially for those pursuing aviation as a career.

None of us had any ideas how to secure this financing, however. And even if that was available, it still wouldn’t bring students through the doors. After a short tangent on the possibility that flight training might evolve into a system were students train for their desired flying mission—recreation, personal transportation, or a career—Radtke watered the garden of ideas: Creating personalized learning experiences tailored to a student’s particular needs is only of half of the solution. “The challenge is that flight training still has to fulfill a number of antiquated requirements.”

Digesting all of this later, herein, I realized is the key: training innovations are held hostage by the current time-equals-experience certification requirements. The future of flight training must be built on a foundation of new FAA requirements that have been tailored to the 21st century. If the industry waits for the FAA to do this, it’ll never happen because FAA reacts to stuff. Being proactive is not in its charter, and realistically, that’s the way it should be.

So, if flight training wants to have a future, it must put aside its individual desires for a larger piece of a shrinking pie, close ranks from top to bottom, and develop certification requirements and a training model that work as a unified system that meet today’s needs of pilots who fly for fun or profit. Certainly this would be no easy undertaking, but nothing worthwhile ever is. And once the unified group has its plan in place, with all the details hammered out and most of the problems solved, it needs to beat on the FAA’s door, and keep beating until it achieves a successful reaction.

A hint of what that system might look like revealed itself in the disconnected comments of the panel. Flight training in the future would be proficiency based and mission oriented. It would be modular, so pilots would take the training that would give them more quickly achieved goals, not to mention the pilot privileges they desire, from solo, to carrying passengers in controlled airspace, to night and instrument flight, to cross-country, and all the rest.

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to overcome is the prospect of change. No one likes change, but the future of flight training, not to mention aviation itself, depends on it. Without a wise, measured, comprehensive, and unanimous plan for what flight training should become, oblivion is unavoidable. — Scott Spangler