November 2004
There are natural limits on how well flight schools can operate.
On the civilian side of the equation, flight schools are limited in what they can teach their students by cost and time. On the military side, the only real restriction on the quality of what they can teach their flying students is time. Money isn’t that big an object, but they can’t spend five years teaching a new pilot who has a 10-year service commitment. As it is, almost two years are required to get a military pilot from first flight to first fight.
Those of us that have been around flying for a while and have been instructing for a large part of that time recognize that flight training never ends. From the time your instructor walked you around that trainer and showed you what a real aileron looked like right up to last week’s North Atlantic Crossing in a 777, if you don’t learn something every time you fly there is something wrong with you.
Both kinds of schools have their drawbacks. Civilian flight schools make their money by getting their students through a program with a minimum of fuss while keeping their costs low. Military flight schools train their students for specific functions. For example, they don’t have time to train you to fly a fighter and a helicopter and don’t even talk to them about getting a hot air balloon rating.
Richard Bach wrote a short story a long time ago about what a perfect flight school would be like and how it would be run. I think it was titled, “A School for Perfection” but I don’t know in what magazine it was published. His views mirrored a lot of my own. I apologize right now to Richard if I unwittingly stole any of his ideas and made them my own. He was thinking along these lines when I was still cleaning toilets at Lakeland Flying Service.
Today, there are many flight schools that tell you they can take you from zero time to the right seat of an airliner. Just pay them eighty grand or more and you are on your way! I can’t comment on how well-trained you would be when you exit out of the back door of these schools. For all I know they may be the best thing that has ever happened to the aviation world.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of a license mill. You graduate with ratings, time and maybe a little skill but damn little real world experience. The schools can’t allow you to scare yourself too much; it would raise their insurance costs.
Also, while some smaller airlines may give you an interview after getting out of one of these schools, the majors still won’t look at you until you’ve got an ATP, a few thousand hours and some turbine time along with a four-year degree.
Let’s get away from airlines, though, and get back to the meat of the matter. First, what would be the best way to operate a flight school and second, is a first-rate flight school even possible? I’ll limit myself to the civilian side of the question because I am a civilian pilot, not a military one.
Besides, the military seems to be turning out pilots in a fairly efficient manner. With the long service commitments they demand from their new pilots it is unlikely that many will move on to the airlines or general aviation any time soon.
This is one of the reasons that the new license mills are in existence. One more caveat before I begin my tirade on flight training. What I am saying is only the opinion of a 30-year plus airline captain and professional general aviation pilot and instructor. Like Dennis Miller always says: “This is just my opinion and I might be wrong.”
The Perfect School
The way you get experience is simply to go out and get experience. The students at my flight school would be full-time students. No outside jobs, no attending another college, no long vacations, and no skiing weekends. Too many flight schools today make the process of learning look like an afterthought and not the main event. If you don’t think so just read one of those “Train in Sunny Florida” advertisements.
The reason I demand this kind of commitment from our students is because they are going to need to be that committed to learn what they need to learn. Flight training is not a part-time occupation for my instructors and it is not a part-time hobby for my students. If my students want to just work a few hours a week at learning about flying they can go elsewhere.
At our school, I want committed students. Students start by working on the ramp. If they can’t be safe on an active airport ramp they have no business in a cockpit. They will learn how to do all line crew duties from pulling the airplanes out of the hangar to sweeping said hangar to fueling the planes, tying them down before and during storms and washing them. You can’t learn how to appreciate the fact that an aircraft is a living thing unless you spend a lot of time with it.
The time a student spends on the ramp doesn’t just teach the basics of airplane care and management, it teaches them to respect the equipment, the process and the art of aviation and flying.
You have no idea what it means to tie down an airplane until you do so in a forty-knot pre-thunderstorm gust. You have no feel for the importance of fuel caps until you’ve taken off and put back about a thousand of them. Once you clean the bugs off of a windshield or climbed off of a one-hundred-degree hot metal wing you’ll get the kind of attitude we look for in a student.
Getting any kind of aircraft into the air takes a lot of hard work from a lot of hard-working people. Once our students spend their time working on the ramp they will never ever look on a line person or a ground service person with anything but respect. Our students aren’t just pumping gas and washing windshields during their line crew days. They are building models, doing classroom work, and spending literally hundreds of hours discussing flying with their instructors and other students.
We don’t train to minimums
Their classroom training includes much more than learning how to fool the FAA into thinking they know the minimum required for their ratings. They read the classics: “The Little Prince,” “Fate is the Hunter,” “The Spirit of St Louis,” the list is almost endless. Our students will be the leaders in aviation when they graduate and move through their careers.
At our school we make damn sure they are classically trained. Classes in aviation history are, of course, mandatory. They will know who Alberto Santos-Dumont was. They will know their Jimmy Doolittle backwards and forwards. They will be able to tell anyone that asks them the reason that the Corsair fighter had an inverse gull wing design. At our flight school we train to Maximums, not Minimums.
The FAA has designed their pilot certification system to cater to the average and the below average. Once they get though our school, ratings, licenses, and FAA approvals to our students will be afterthoughts.
When do they get to fly? They get to fly in some form or fashion every single day. First, their models will fly, assuming they have learned the basics of aerodynamics enough to make them flyable. Next, they will fly gliders, then powered trainers, then more powerful trainers.
Along the way, our students will fly seaplanes, hot air balloons gyroplanes and helicopters. If it flies they will learn how to fly it. At our flight school we don’t pursue ratings, we are after training and understanding.
To our students, an engine failure in a single engine aircraft, while being a pain in the butt, is no big emergency. After all, in their glider training they have already made hundreds of dead stick landings. They also know about thermals and how to get the most out of an airfoil.
From their model building and flying they can name the parts of an airplane and know what they do because they have built and used them. They not only know what a longeron is, they have built dozens of them, know where they go and what they do. From their ballooning experience they have learned how to read the signs. They can look at the trees and grass below them and gauge the wind. Also, from their ballooning time, they have learned team work. You can’t fly a balloon without a chase crew.
At our flight school we strive for perfection with every single training event. As my old instructor George Warren used to say: “You are always supposed to be working toward perfection. Fifty feet off your altitude is fifty feet too many. You should always be working toward zero feet off.”
While recognizing that different students at different levels of their training will have different outcomes we will never accept a half-assed effort. It is when you learn how to do a 180-degree power-off spot landing in a Cessna or Piper that you learn how to set a 777 down in a forty-knot crosswind. Everything is important.
Instructors will instruct
This leads to the next question about our flight school. Who will we use for instructors? This is a sore point and one that I’m sure a lot of you will disagree with me on but keep in mind that I am building the best flight school in the world here, okay?
We will only hire older, very experienced professional instructor pilots. Pilots that have been around. These are guys and gals that I will have to recruit. This is because they are already successful—they aren’t looking for a job.
Why look only for very experienced pilots and instructors? Let me answer that with a question. Who would you like to get advice from while flying an aircraft down the ILS final in a driving rainstorm? A 500-hour very nice instructor who is doing this job so he or she can get a better flying job later, or a 16,000-hour veteran professional pilot that has flown ILS approaches in bad weather in all kinds of aircraft at airports from Hong Kong to Tallahassee? Which person has more to teach you?
When our students learn aerobatics (and they will learn aerobatics) they will do so from a person that has gone Mach 2 upside down and almost vertical. When they learn how to slip a taildragger to a landing in the grass on a windy day they will learn from a grizzled, experienced bush pilot.
How will I get experienced older pilots like that to work for me? Well, first I think there are thousands of pilots out there just dying to teach in a school like I’ve described. Oh, and did I mention that starting pay for our instructors is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year with full benefits? How will you pay for all this? How could our students possibly afford this kind of top-notch training? Especially when you consider that I think it will take at least four years to get through our program?
That’s the easy part—our students pay nothing. It is all free of charge, including living expenses, while they train.
Here is the main idea I’ve definitely stolen from Richard Bach and I thank him for it once again: Our students pay us later throughout their entire career. About 10 percent of their income should do it. And since they are donating the money to a school, it is probably income tax-deductible to boot!
Imagine thousands of professional pilots over the years routinely paying back 10 percent of their income to their flight school. Thousands of senior airline pilots. Thousands of corporate chief pilots, helicopter pilots, blimp drivers, forest department pilots, aircraft salesmen and brokers. You get the idea.
The problem won’t be having enough money to run the school it will be finding things to spend all the money on when it comes in.
Later, when they are experienced enough, after decades of flying and other aviation jobs, our alumni may get the biggest honor they can imagine. They may be asked by me to come to our campus and teach. Does that all sound too good to be true? Maybe so, but it is much better in my never-to-be-humble opinion than training pilots the least amount possible and then turning them loose on the skies.
Flying is a lifestyle and an art, not something you do instead of going fishing or square dancing. It is about time we recognize that and train the next generation of pilots. If any of you out there have a few million bucks you want to invest, give me a call and we’ll get the school started. Hell, I’ll even name it after you!
Kevin Garrison’s aviation career began at age 15 as a lineboy in Lakeland, Fla. He came up through general aviation and is currently a senior 767 captain. When not frightening passengers, Kevin plays tennis and lives on a horse farm in Kentucky where he writes unsold humor projects and believes professional wrestling is real and all else is bogus.
