It was 22 years ago this month that I first walked into a flight school as a prospective flight student. I had completed the ground school a few months earlier, shuttled to and from those seemingly endless night classes by my parents. The long-awaited sixteenth birthday which occurred that May meant one thing: a driver's license that would allow me to drive myself to the airport to begin flight lessons.
The flight school in northwestern Pennsylvania was-in fact, still is-a true mom-and-pop operation. The husband-and-wife team still own and operate the flight school just as they did two decades ago. I was there this past weekend, this time with a wife and two kids in tow and flying my own airplane. Things certainly have changed, but the atmosphere is the same. It truly is a place where everyone knows your name. John Julian, the instructor, still sits at the picnic table on the back porch. With his baseball cap pushed far back on his head and a cigarette in one hand, he dispenses aviation wisdom and the finer points of aerodynamics using a beat-up old plastic airplane model. Students young and old (the young ones look really young these days) sit in awe, absorbing bits and pieces of experience from his nearly 40 years and tens of thousands of hours. For him and his business partner/bookkeeper/wife Bernice, the flight school is their life's work, and they wear the badge proudly.
It's not like that everywhere.
At many flight schools these days, the aviation wisdom is doled out by a clean-cut 22-year-old with 400 flight hours. He or she is probably working on a multiengine rating, anxious to build twin time for an airline job. With the airlines hiring pilots right and left, the CFI will probably get that airline job sooner rather than later, probably right at some critical point in the private pilot curriculum for one of his students. If it's a good school, the student will be handed off to another instructor who will have a different teaching style and personality that may or may not sit well with the student. If it's not such a savvy school, the frustrated student will simply drift away, never to complete his training.
In fact, flight instructor retention is one of the biggest issues facing flight schools today. In late March, the Aviation Council of Pennsylvania hosted the fourth annual International Flight School Operators Conference in Allentown, Pennsylvania. More than 125 flight school owners and operators attended the two-day seminar to learn more about the status of the flight training industry, brush up on marketing skills, and share their concerns and successes. I was on a panel with a television producer and a newspaper reporter where we discussed ways for flight schools to build relationships with the media. Representatives from Be-A-Pilot reported on the 1999 plans for that industrywide effort to increase the number of student pilots, and a handful of exhibitors displayed their wares.
For me, the most interesting sessions were the marketing workshops. There, groups of about 20 flight school operators held in-depth discussions about their common problems and the things that have worked, as well as some that didn't work. It was refreshing to see the operators so open with their problems and solutions. Competitiveness was left at the door.
I was impressed to see so many young faces around the table. A few of the schools were owned or operated by older folks, but at least four were start-ups; owned by people in their late 20s to early 30s, these schools were less than three years old. The young entrepreneurs often had degrees from aviation universities. They were among the most marketing-savvy of those in the room, and their enthusiasm was contagious. As one young man passionately put it, "This is what I want do to. I want to teach people to fly. I'm not looking for an airline job."
All of the operators expressed frustration with the lack of respect afforded flight instructors. There is a stigma associated with those who proclaim that they want to be "professional flight instructors." Those who see flight instruction as simply a process to be endured while en route to an airline job seem to look down on those who see flight instruction as a career in and of itself.
The economics of flight instruction seem to be turned upside down, the operators agreed. In any other industry, those who teach new entrants are held in high regard and paid the best. Just the opposite is true in flight instruction. In a "normal" business scenario, the business owner would be in favor of as low a wage as possible for employees. Economics 101: Low overhead means more profit. But each of the flight school operators was in favor of higher instructor pay, recognizing that without it, the flight instructors would continue to be siphon-ed off to higher-paying positions.
The operators seem to feel that the price of flight instruction is fairly inelastic. For most people, learning to fly is a discretionary expense, so if it's priced too high, customers will simply find something else to do with their money. In addition, the operators fear competition from flight instructors who operate independently, without the proper insurance and other overhead expenses required of flight schools. A survey of those in the room showed that the prices charged for primary flight instruction ranged from $18 to $30 per hour. Instrument, commercial, and multiengine instruction commands an extra few dollars per hour. One flight school operator said she had recently raised her basic rates from $15 an hour to $20 and was planning to raise them to $25. "Surprisingly, no one has complained," she said.
On average, the instructors earn about $15 per billed hour, although payment plans varied dramatically. Some schools paid their instructors a certain amount for each flight hour and a lesser amount for ground instruction. Others paid a basic salary with a lesser amount for each hour of instruction. Others paid a bonus to instructors who bill more than a certain amount per month. And still others offered free flight time for every so many hours of instruction.
One of the biggest issues is getting instructors to bill for all of the hours that they should, the operators lamented. The young instructors seem reluctant to bill for ground school and for preflight briefings and postflight debriefings. Time cards, time clocks, and built-in charges for debriefings were among the solutions offered. "If a plumber shows up at your house, you're paying him from the time he gets there until he leaves. Why not for flight instructing?" one owner asked. "They're flying with a doctor, lawyer, accountant. [These people are] used to billing by the hour, and most of them wouldn't think twice about being billed by the hour themselves. It's just a matter of convincing the flight instructors that they are professionals too."
Hand in hand with the instructors' reluctance to bill the customer is a reluctance to "sell" flight instruction. "I hear them on the phone with a prospective student and I just shake my head. I won't let them take those calls anymore," said one owner. It seems that the flight instructors are quick to point out how much it costs, how long it will take, the delays during bad weather, the airplane maintenance issues, and all of the technical difficulties of earning the private certificate. They don't seem to know how to convince people of the joys of learning to fly.
The informative seminar was not a complaint session about instructors. Each of the operators was also a flight instructor, and they seem to feel a responsibility to both their instructor employees and to their customers to offer quality instruction at a fair price, while at the same time paying a fair wage and earning a fair profit. The older flight school operators particularly seemed to feel an obligation to pass on not only a fair wage, but also a passion for aviation that will cause maybe one or two of those instructors aiming for an airline job to stop and consider flight instructing as a career.
I couldn't help but look at some of the young, enthusiastic faces and wonder how many of them will be able to tough it out long enough to really establish their schools. Will their passion for aviation and their love of seeing a student pilot solo endure through stretched lines of credit and the ups and downs of the flight instruction business?
Twenty years from now, will their former students return with their own families in their own airplanes to see that same passion being passed on to a whole new generation of potential flight instructors? I can only wonder and hope.
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