Flight Instructors - What is important?

[photofly]

...no seat in a 705 without an ATPL. It wont change instructor motivation, but it will allow alternate business models to an large FTU.

How will that allow alternate business models? Can you elaborate?

That would seem to me to be a large retrograde step; instructors forced to work far longer for $18 per hour at a job they don't really want.

[digits_]

But that's already happening. You are getting a serious discount on what it would really cost to keep someone interested in flight instructing. Instead of paying 200 dollars an hour, you are paying 80 dollars an hour because you are also giving an hour to the new instructor to keep him interested in instructing.

It's certainly not happening honestly and transparently.

WIth dentists and hairdressers, the trainees whose services (one assumes) one can purchase at a discount are training to to provide the same services but more competently and without supervision, and therefore for more money. The trainees are the minority, the qualified and expert practitioners are the majority.

It would be perfectly natural for trainee flight instructors to be available at a discount to the price of any member of a large cadre of experienced instructors, a pool which those trainees aspire to join for the better salary. But there is no large cadre of experienced instructors. By a huge majority, every flight instructor is a trainee.

Why don't you try to change things? Your previous posts seem to indicate you are somehow connected to an FTU. Why don't you ask them to perform an experiment. Start small. Let's say you give students the option to book a "senior instructor" for a 20 dollar an hour surcharge. The PR would be the hardest part, but you could advertise it as a bit of a more accelerated way of getting your license to students who are committing full time to more in depth learning etc. This surcharge would guarantee the student that the instructor has at least X (5?) years of instructing experience and/or X years of 704/705/... experience.

See if there are any takers. If so, increase the surcharge when the demand exceeds the supply. Once the surcharge reaches 50 - 100 dollars,you will probably be able to attract experienced pilots wanting to switch back to instructing. There are some great advantages (be home every night, day flying only -mostly -, ..) to instructing, I wouldn't be surprised to see more pilots return if it became a more viable career choice.

Hopefully by that time, the students paying the surcharge would have had positive experiences and be spreading the word to other students.

This is not just a wild idea to make a point. I honestly think that this experiment could be successful. But you'd need a long term instructor to initiate it.

[ayseven]

Schools already offer the option of a more expensive instructor. I paid a lot more than the going rate for your average instructor for my retraining recently. The guys were offering a lot more than just "what to do", and were full of good advice, and to me, well worth it. The trouble now, is that there are not many of these experts around, and the FTUs are full of college kids trying to get their PPLs and CPLs, making it hard to even get a booking.

[youhavecontrol]

What would have kept my happily instructing for years more would have been if the company I worked for was ran differently.

I loved teaching but the company started to drive me crazy. So many suggestions were rejected it started to piss me off. They never invested in current/relevant training aids that we desperately needed, did not pay for certain briefings we were expected to do, kept the nicest equipment in the hands of the domestic students while giving the international ones the worn-out hand-me-downs, turned a blind eye towards repeated maintenance issues... I could go on.

It seemed the more responsibility I took on and learned, the more I started to hate how things were running. The pay rate was reasonable, but there wasn't always proper compensation for hours worked and they refused to change it because of the international contracts. They were very reactive and not pro-active in any way regarding equipment and updating.

TL/DR: Invest in your equipment, take me seriously as part of your team and pay for the activities you expect me to do and I'll stay.

[Squaretail]

But, ab-initio flight instruction should not be used an intermediate-level training programme for future airline pilots, and if it is, those airline training programmes - sorry - flight instructor jobs - should not be paid for by other student pilots, they should be paid for by the airlines who benefit from that training.

In general photofly, I wholly agree with you. And you hit on who should be taking a bigger hand in this scheme if they wish to have a steady flow of recruits. In some parts of the world this is already the case where from start to finish the goal is simply training airline pilots, even if it will put some of those candidates through training the next crop, doubling up who's learning stuff, or at least getting the all-sought hours in the book. Ultimately hours in the logbook which are the way the whole industry views one's hireability needs to change, but I don't see that changing soon either. Lets be really honest as well: The only ones who really suffer through this scheme are pilots seeking to learn for purpose other than the end airline goal.

What irritates me is the hypocrisy of a "flight training unit" where the people doing the real learning are not the "students", they are the "instructors". At least when you allow a student hairdresser or student dentist to learn their trade on your hair or your teeth, you know in advance they don't know what they're doing.

I would debate whether the students aren't cognizant of this reality, and engage in it anyways. The other way for this scheme to change is for the customers to vote with their dollars - which they do - they love cheap flight instruction. I have yet to run into any student with some life experience who doesn't right away clue in that their instructor ain't that experienced when it comes to the wide world of aviation. But many also know that the instructor knows enough - at least to get them a license.

Frankly, if it makes you so much of a better pilot to train me how to fly straight and level in a 150, you should be paying me.

Again lets be straight, if an hour of instructing conferred so much more experience to the instructor flying level in said 150, well the aviation world wouldn't be asking that he does it for several hundred of those (or thousand) to count towards anything. If it makes you happy, I have yet to run into a chief pilot who was super happy to hire guys who had only instructing time on their resume.

Ultimately I think wishing for the current system to change is as pie in the sky as hoping there is going to be a big wave of airline pilots volunteering their time to fix training issues. If I was to pick one place that is achievable for better training outcomes it would be to (and BPF hit on this) have some better QC on the CFIs in this equation.