Looking for the right stuff

Imagine you’re a retired rocket scientist. You helped put some of America’s most important scientific initiatives into space. Learning to fly should be a walk in the park compared to understanding astronautics, and you would never expect to spend $28,000 earning a private pilot certificate. But that’s exactly what happened to John Davis.

Davis’ story of dozens of flight instructors and years of training is, unfortunately, not unique. Thousands of people drop out of flight training every year because of the substandard training they receive. Davis made it, because of sheer willpower—and because he finally found his savior in Ed Barros, the chief instructor at Cirrus Aviation in Sarasota, Florida. Barros saw Davis’ logbook as a “miscarriage of justice,” and decided he needed to intervene in order to get the retired NASA engineer through to the end. Barros’ secret ingredient was actually pretty simple. “My main goal is to empower students,” he says. “You need a cheerleader.” With that, and some careful thought about how to appeal to Davis’s analytical approach to problems, Barros created a private pilot and aircraft owner.

A few years ago AOPA embarked on a mission to help students like John Davis. The association started the Flight Training Initiative, a program aimed at stemming the huge outflow of students from the flight training pipeline. The initiative began with a major research project that discovered what the ideal flight training experience should look like (see “The Flight Training Experience,” March 2011 Flight Training). From that research, AOPA has launched a number of projects. Recently the association announced the biggest to date—the AOPA Flight Training Excellence Awards.

The excellence awards are designed to highlight the schools, flying clubs, and independent flight instructors that best follow the attributes identified in the research. Those attributes came directly from thousands of student pilots, certificated pilots, flight instructors, and lapsed students. In other words, it’s what the community told AOPA an effective flight training operation should be. “Having done the research and validated it, we are in the position of having good insights into flight training,” said AOPA President and CEO Craig Fuller.

Fuller’s concept for the awards came from other programs that he thinks have raised the bar in other industries, including the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program for business innovation and the Leapfrog Group for health care. “There are parallels with other industries that award people under known criteria,” he said. Like these groups, the AOPA Flight Training Excellence Awards seek to raise the standard of the product and recognize the industry’s best performers.

In a way, the awards process is a means for telling a story. The research project identified 47 unique attributes that feed into the ideal flight training experience. Understanding and being able to act on those attributes can be difficult. But with the awards, the nomination form spells out the vital keys that a student pilot needs in order to be successful. “By exposing people to the nominating survey, we expose them to the knowledge,” Fuller said.

How it works. The process for participating is simple. Students, flight schools, and flight instructors take an online survey. There you can learn more about the awards and nominate a flight school, a flying club, or independent instructor. The survey will take about 10 minutes, and includes questions related to the research. You will be asked things such as whether you agree that the school uses lesson plans that are tailored to the student, and whether you agree that students receive recognition for their success in training. Anyone can complete a survey, whether a student pilot or an ATP.

The results will be reviewed by AOPA, and any school that meets or exceeds the criteria will win an award. These will be presented at AOPA Aviation Summit in Palm Springs, California, in October.

It’s difficult to say at this point what a winning school will look like, but there is certainty around a few key points. First, it doesn’t matter how big or small the school is. As Fuller puts it, “There is no stuffing the ballot box.” The association recognizes that smaller rural schools may not churn out as many pilots as those in urban centers, and will therefore have fewer nominations. Schools will win because their survey results correlate strongly to the research. “We see success all around us,” Fuller said. These are schools like the Redbird Skyport in San Marcos, Texas, that since January has been graduating students at an average of fewer than 40 hours of flight time. And Sporty’s Academy in Batavia, Ohio, that recently brought in a Frasca Mentor simulator to better study how that device can save students money and get them through training more effectively.

According to Fuller, a program such as the AOPA Flight Training Excellence Awards doesn’t produce results overnight. But he said, “I believe we are in a good position to help shift the training paradigm in a direction we believe will make schools more successful.” And if schools are more successful, students will be more successful—and the entire GA marketplace will grow. Fuller said his hope is that over time the number of award winners will grow as schools recognize the impact the research can have on their businesses, and as they adopt those best practices.

But for that to happen, he says that participation among students and customers is key. “We’re asking anyone who wants to participate to do so,” he said. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, it will allow AOPA to better assess what’s happening in the marketplace, and perhaps even share the feedback on a confidential basis with the school. Fuller said he feels so strongly that participation is key to improving the flight training process that AOPA is offering a challenge coin to everyone who fills out a survey. The coins are based on a tradition dating back to World War I to commemorate members of a certain group.

“I’m pretty confident the award concept will have a favorable impact,” Fuller said. “We will make improvements over time. I’m optimistic we can move the needle.” Do your part: Complete the survey.