Looking ahead into 2021

As you and your flight training business start the long march through 2021, it’s clear that a few things cannot yet change from what became a way of life in 2020. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that you will need to keep certain procedures in place for the foreseeable future.

Sanitizing your flight school, your airplanes, and your equipment. Flight schools that reopened after the initial COVID-19 shutdown did so with strict sanitizing procedures in place. Customers need to know that your flight school is as clean and safe as you can make it. Putting out hand sanitizer and cleaning doors and countertops regularly is just a starting point. You’ll also need to ensure that your state’s mask and social distancing guidelines are followed (notwithstanding the fact that it’s hard to socially distance in an airplane cockpit). Provide appropriate cleaning items for each airplane and require instructors and/or customers to wipe down the yokes and doors, flap handles, et cetera, after each flight. Ideally, avionics screens should be cleaned after each use, but they cannot be wiped down with the same sanitizing materials as are used for standard cleaning. Flight instructors and customers must understand the difference and the damage that can occur if improper cleaning materials are used. A Florida flight school found that out the hard way earlier in 2020 when the panels of two Cessna 172s were damaged by improper disinfecting materials.

Weighing flight instructors’ needs with your own. The downturn in the industry means more flight instructors are available for hire. That’s good if you’re in need of a flight instructor. However, you may need to give your current staff more flexibility as to how much flight instruction they want to do. Flight training’s gray eagles—retired military and airline pilots or simply pilots with a whole lotta flight hours in their logbooks—may be at a higher risk for COVID infection because of advanced age or underlying medical conditions. So they may not be as anxious to log in-person flight time as they have been in the past. As vaccines become more widely available, this will become less of an issue, but we’re not there yet.

Virtual ground school versus classroom ground school. In-person ground school classes ground to a halt in 2020, and they show no signs of making a comeback just yet. The AOPA Air Safety Institute has suspended in-person Flight Instructor Refresher Clinics and live Safety Seminars for the foreseeable future. Luckily, there’s a ton of technology out there to help you start and run a virtual online ground school class. With Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Ring Central, or one the other platforms, all you need is a laptop or desktop computer to get started. And since many of your clients are already familiar with virtual meetings, the learning curve to navigate the software should be minimal.

Rusty pilots still need your help. Many pilots did not fly as much as they wanted to in 2020, and they need your help to become safe, current, and proficient in 2021. Let them know you’re ready to get them back in the left seat and to make them feel as comfortable as possible doing it. Here’s a list of five webinars from the AOPA Air Safety Institute to help rusty pilots get their head back in the game.

What policies or practices did you institute in 2020 that will continue well into the new year? Tell us and we may feature your flight school in a future issue of the newsletter.