okotoks flight school

[photofly]

Here's a TC document on how flight time applies to helicopters, but it's relevant to airplanes ("aeroplanes") too:
https://www.tc.gc.ca/en/services/aviati ... ION_01.pdf

[trey kule]

It would be nice if TC would publish something like that for fixed wing. Particularly with a table as shown there..
The whole engine start to stop would end.

But...where exactly does it prohibit air time +.2?

[iflyforpie]

It doesn't.

In fact, our TC POI specifically told us to use that method. Never was called on it once.

[Schooner69A]

"How is charging for that time taking advantage?"

I was going to mount a vigorous discussion, but rookiepilot beat me to it.

At my local airport, I have seen one of the local trainers fire up as we boarded our aircraft (formation flight); we fired up, taxied to the ramp, performed our run-ups etc, taxied out to the runway and took off. Trainer was just heading for the ramp...

[Squaretail]

Here is something to give some thought to.
Chalk to chalk is an old military term because the chalks were removed and placed for you.
No need to know aviation history if you are an entitled millennium.
And , I suppose, no need to actually look up the definition of flight time. If you did you would not be making comments like stop and starts. But hey, ignorance allows you to beak off.

Then why are you making comments about chock to chock? I don't see any reference to chocks in CAR 101.01 (1) yet you persist on referring to it as your standard for flight time. But technically speaking first moves under its own power doesn't specify the specific movement of the aircraft. Certainly upon start of the engine the airplane is moving, part of it indeed quite rapidly. Since your whole argument if based upon how you would like to specifically define flight time, the introduction of the placement of chocks doesn't seem relevant, much less so since we're not talking about a military flight school. You brought up the little details of this action.

Yes, there are many areas flight training could be improved. But for those who don’t suffer from under 25 ADD, my post was in response to the discussion.
If you think it is OK to have a regulator approved deviance from the CARs that costs students
more money or dishonest billing, so be it. Btw. The solution to this problem is very simple.

Did I say it was ok with schools dishonest billing? After all, which do you think costs more, a PPL syllabus that for some reason requires a student to spend money on a simulator which is charged at 90% of the airplane rate for part of their PPL or the possible extra minutes at the bookends of flights. The point I'm getting across, is that if you really care about flight training costs, this is peanuts. And if you don't know that, then you don't know much else about how its conducted. There is at least a hundred things that one can lay at the feet of the regulator and FTUs that would contribute more to making flight training more efficient (and I helpfully listed some for you) than worrying about whether a student got their money's worth in the time it took between wheels stopping and engine stopping. While I will say that in many places I've seen its not efficient, I've never seen where it was so outrageous that it would eclipse anything else that particular FTU was doing wrong, and if this was ALL a FTU was doing wrong and one was to petition TC about it, they would rightfully ignore you.

And for the record, any place that I have seen that charges by hobbs time, is pretty up front about that method of billing. It may be the only thing that they're up front about. So even on that small point you can't really say that you didn't know that was the case when you got in the plane.

Rather than trot out problems, how about offering practical solutions to them.

There is no solution to this problem, and partly because in the big scheme of things it isn't one. I have been involved in flight training a long time. I will let you in on a secret. Students themselves are usually the ones trying to stretch their flight time in their books. OR under read it, depending on their motivations. The point is frequently you have a variety of parties that have differing interests in how time is recorded on flights. Instructors definitely usually want flights to be longer, if that's tied to how they are paid. Renters grossly underestimate their time. I should note that in my experience pilots are also horrible at reading watches or clocks and writing down time. At the end of a day, the hobbs meter makes so you collect money for when fuel is being turned into noise. And probably more importantly, so you don't have to argue with people about whether you charged them too much or too little or if they did with your airplane what they said they were going to do with it. Again, this quibble over whether a flight was .1 of an hour shorter or longer pales to say if this happens on a flight with an instructor:

The real ripoff is the one flight I did where after engine started, dude decided to do an unannounced 15 minute "ground briefing " right there in the airplane.

Lots of things to be said about that, and systematic problem to be fixed with some of the problems I listed before as contributing factors. So which do you think is worse? Briefing while engines running or how they wrote the time down at the end? I mean that added a .3 to every flight if that happened. Maybe more in some cases. I can't imagine that instructor was super efficient with the rest of the lesson.

On the issue of -.2 for airtime, I have had different interpretations from TC people in the same office. Some specified it had to be that way, some remarked on how suspicious the time recording was so perfect. I will say that most of them are united in their opinion that the difference between flight and air time can't be less than .2 Even as efficient as I usually am even with students. At the end of the day, its an argument not worth having with your POI, there's bigger things to fight them on. Even if it is severely irritating when one POI gives you shit for doing what another POI gave you shit for not doing before. One won't even get into the whole silliness about making minutes written down fitting tenths of hours to make them happy.

At the end of the day, airplanes don't turn into pumpkins and the pilots into mice at a minute past the fraction of whatever hour they were flying.

I never could understand how some instructors could look a student straight in the face and casually explain 70 hour ppls as normal. The flight syllabus has not changed in some 30 years, But after seeing some of the posts here, I get it now...

The prime reasons its that way is there's no market for quality of training or efficiency of training. If everyone was interested in doing it at best cost, FTUs would be over run with customers demanding cadet like courses, which there isn't. Flight schools succeed or fail on location, location, location. Convenience is the number one quality by far that any non-career students shop by, and so do many domestic career oriented students. For better or worse, the product one gets at FTUs is probably what their market has dictated.

You'll forgive me when I get irritated when people who don't instruct, don't work at schools, know everything about how it can be done better. IF this is your chosen hill to die on to improve flight training, and more people think like that, well then there's no friggin' hope for the whole business of it. But feel free to start your campaign with transport about it, I look forward to seeing how that turns out in future posts.

BTW, its also rich the guy who doesn't know the difference between chock and chalk lecturing us on military terminology and history.

At my local airport, I have seen one of the local trainers fire up as we boarded our aircraft (formation flight); we fired up, taxied to the ramp, performed our run-ups etc, taxied out to the runway and took off. Trainer was just heading for the ramp...

Well I should hope that the experienced guys would always beat the students in the race to the runway. Sometimes people forget what its like to be new at something. Assuming that you were doing something cool in flying in formation, I'm sure its not lost on you that the instructor/student combo may have been spending a bit of time watching what you were doing.

[Zaibatsu]

Old Mr Trey talking out of his ass as usual. Chalk is what you used on your slate in that one room schoolhouse.

Look. You’re paying for flight hours at a school. If the Hobbs says 1.0. You get charged for 1.0. 1.0 get put into your log book and your PTR, and it gets signed off by TC and you get your licence.

How much of that time is effective may depend on the school and how much they are milking you by getting you to do a million things while the engine is running but before the aircraft is moving and vice versa, but it also depends on you as a student.

Have you studied the FTM and FTGU and your copy of the training syllabus before your lesson? Have you hangar flown the aircraft or armchair flown after a lesson or studied a cockpit poster? Have you prepared your maps and your nav log and your flight plan? Can you answer all of the questions on the threshold knowledge test before the lesson?

Because if you can’t, and I have to spend my time briefing you on stuff you should already know, and explaining things to you in the cockpit that you should already know, you’re going to get charged for it.

And you should be grateful because it’s a small fee to salvage a lesson, vs blowing briefing or PGI and flight time learning absolutely nothing.

Nobody runs a flight school to get rich. Nobody becomes a flight instructor to get rich. If flight training aircraft swapped to GPS trackers that activated every time they moved, the hourly rate would go up in order to meet costs for air time and calendar time, and your training would take longer because you can’t accrue time as fast.

[Squaretail]

I'm also sure its not lost on some the irony of demanding a more accurate accounting of time in a flight that inherently uses an inaccurate system. As of yet we don't record flights to the second, not even the minute but rather the tenth of an hour. Which one might note that when it comes to rounding an actual minute count gives a relatively wide variation. For example, a .8 flight time, can be anywhere between 46 minutes to 51 minutes. A swath of 5 minutes which is a relatively large margin of inaccuracy that the time between engine start and aircraft movement should fall easily in, with all but the most dazed pilots perhaps taking a greater length. In fact it will easily account for the time that is being "overcharged" for at the beginning AND end of a flight, in all but the most extreme circumstances. If someone is blaming their 70 hour PPL on this accounting of time, they had no clue what really resulted in that overage of PPL costs, or don't want to acknowledge their own complicity in it.

One should also note that un-intuitively, the rounding chart as presented in the AIM, doesn't adhere to normal rounding rules we all should have learned in about grade 4. For example 51 minutes out of sixty gives .85 of an hour, which one would normally round up to .9, but rounds down to .8 for time keeping purposes. I have yet to come up with a good reason why that is when student pilots have asked, besides that TC says so.

[rookiepilot]

Nobody runs a flight school to get rich.

No, Of course not.

Flight schools promote those cross- border "experience" trips out of a sense of charity.

The odd plane lost or pre - PPL students killed, just part of the price of being so charitable.

[photofly]

I'm also sure its not lost on some the irony of demanding a more accurate accounting of time in a flight that inherently uses an inaccurate system.

You're confusing accuracy and precision. Recording flights to the nearest 0.1 isn't very precise, but it is accurate, because (if it's done properly) the errors are evenly biased to either side, you will round up as often as you round down, and on average, the errors cancel out over a run of flights.

The mean error is in fact zero, and the standard deviation goes down as 1 / sqrt(n), n being the number of flights.

[Beefitarian]

Um? Why are people fighting? Name calling because of a miss spell?

Your a bunch ov krabz.

[Squaretail]

I'm also sure its not lost on some the irony of demanding a more accurate accounting of time in a flight that inherently uses an inaccurate system.

You're confusing accuracy and precision. Recording flights to the nearest 0.1 isn't very precise, but it is accurate, because (if it's done properly) the errors are evenly biased to either side, you will round up as often as you round down, and on average, the errors cancel out over a run of flights.

The mean error is in fact zero, and the standard deviation goes down as 1 / sqrt(n), n being the number of flights.

First, I bow to your superior use of terminology. Second, try explaining that to your POI (or other experts) whom assumes that you would always use such a system to round in one's favour, in some dastardly plan to somehow become rich flying little airplanes.

The point still stands though, that at the end of he day, the little details of time keeping just ain't that important.

[praveen4143]

I seriously don't understand why we're arguing over something as trivial as how time is logged instead of looking at the fact that ab initio training is increasingly being conducted in very complex airspace. You wouldn't have a kindergarten student learning in the middle of a mall where there are a ton of distractions, would you?
Being able to learn in a small aerodrome without much complicated airspace and too much traffic would be ideal but not always feasible. That's a start.

Then of course there's the question of rookie instructors teaching concepts they are barely familiar with themselves. I know because I've been there and done that and I've also been on the other side having supervised a few rookie instructors. In one of the cases, it was a smaller setup and I was able to do a decent enough job of it. But, at large schools, I've noticed there isn't enough time or effort put into making sure that rookie instructors get enough guidance or supervision put into them. So they go out and do nonsensical things that will help them get the hours faster and out of the small iron into the bigger one faster without caring as much for the quality of the product they deliver. In an ideal world, instructors would only be retired pilots who are highly experienced but that's not the case, so the onus should be on ensuring proper guidance and supervision happens from class 1/2 instructors to the rookies.

[C.W.E.]

In an ideal world, instructors would only be retired pilots who are highly experienced but that's not the case,

In a logical world that would be the way it is done.

How come it is not done?

[Squaretail]

In a logical world that would be the way it is done.

How come it is not done?

You're a retired pilot, why aren't you doing it?

[C.W.E.]

You're a retired pilot, why aren't you doing it?

Because of the fact that in Canada you can not teach new pilots without having to hold a FTUOC.

Under that system the pay is so low one can not even consider it.

If we had the same rules as the FAA then any licensed instructor can teach anyone and the pay is based on quality of instruction.

[Squaretail]

So if the pay was right, then you would be totally back into teaching ab initio? So far I haven't heard that instructing is hugely lucrative south of the border, and there is a demand there more so than here for flight instructors. Why aren't they being paid more down there?

[5x5]

In an ideal world, instructors would only be retired pilots who are highly experienced but that's not the case,

I don't agree with this opinion. First of all, teaching abinitio students is a lot of repetitive work that requires significant effort and the commitment to a lot of student's individual schedules. Most of the retired airline pilots I know have no desire to be tied up in that manner nor do they want to put up with the stress and time commitment that's involved. Look up the definition of retirement - it's essentially the antithesis of flight instructing.

Additionally, I'm not sure that 10,000+ hours of, as one senior airline pilot described it to me years ago, "monitoring the aircraft with your feet up on the desk" adds much value that can be imparted to a pre-solo PPL student.

I think way too many people on this forum are much too quick to malign flight instructors without giving credit for the job they do in a very demanding setting. Can it be better? Of course, but pick any job, there's no human endeavour that can't be improved. But as with any established system, there's very rarely one single thing that can be changed to produce dramatically better results.

Looking globally, with Canada's and North America's overall safety record, it seems that pretty good pilot's are somehow being produced.

[Squaretail]

I don't agree with this opinion. First of all, teaching abinitio students is a lot of repetitive work that requires significant effort and the commitment to a lot of student's individual schedules. Most of the retired airline pilots I know have no desire to be tied up in that manner nor do they want to put up with the stress and time commitment that's involved. Look up the definition of retirement - it's essentially the antithesis of flight instructing.

Exactly. If the main fix for flight training in this country hinges on dragging a lot of guys out of retirement, then its doomed. Unfortunately, it already uses up everyone who does want to do this. I would speculate that you would need EVERY retired pilot to start chipping in to make a difference. One should note that this plan also assumes that every pilot of retirement age, has also had a breadth of experience to pass on that would be useful at the initial stage of flight training.

I will admit severe annoyance on this subject that the most experienced voices, which carry some weight in the pilot world often have these less than productive key points of what can be improved, and what should indeed be the focus of improvement. Things that aren't useful or practical, yet often get carried down into the training world to the uninitiated to take away from any productive efforts.

[photofly]

I don't think retired accountants necessarily make very good teachers of arithmetic, and I don't see why a retired airline pilot should ex-officio be good at teaching ab-initio flying skills. They might be, or they might not.

I should think a decent tennis coach or high school teacher with basic facility at flying a single engine piston aircraft would likely make a decent flight instructor. The ability to observe the behaviour of the trainee, analyze it objectively, and determine how, when and whether to intervene to improve the trainee's performance is paramount. To the extent that an airline pilot learns those skills, so too do people in many professions.

[C.W.E.]

So if the pay was right, then you would be totally back into teaching ab initio? So far I haven't heard that instructing is hugely lucrative south of the border, and there is a demand there more so than here for flight instructors. Why aren't they being paid more down there?

The pay in a FTU is abysmal because the instructors are mostly new commercial pilots using instruction as a means of getting flying hours.

Even more reason for me not to want to instruct for a Canadian flight school is the fact that you must instruct the way T.C. demands you do.

If we had the same regulations the FAA has where any licensed flight instructor can teach PPL's without having to go through the agony and money it costs to get a FTU-OC that T.C. demands and having to put up with the mindset of a lot of T.
C. flight school inspectors then yes I would go back to flight instruction because I enjoy teaching.

Money would not be the motivating factor for me as I am quite satisfied with my present monetary situation.