Thank you for your words of support. No, I am not willing to share, but thank you for your interest.
Well, you see, that's just too bad but I'm going to share my side of the experience nonetheless. I'm a student and my school seems to enjoy quite a positive reputation. Yet, being now in my early 30s and having seen a few industries in my professional life, I am no longer the naive bloke that I might have been in my early 20s. And I find the way my school is organised just laughable. Lesson cancellations are daily business, flights delayed because of previous lessons going overtime as well. I stopped counting the times I showed up at the school only to hear that the wind picked up or that the lesson would have to be rescheduled. Without exaggeration, I reckon that more than 1/3 of my lessons need to be rescheduled. The best part is how ad-hoc rescheduling is always being handled. Luckily there's a syllabus that they have to follow which gives the whole training a remote sense of backbone. Allow me to make a comparison. My dentist calls me to reschedule an appointment. The first mark of respect is to acknowledge that I am the client, ie. the money flows from me to them, and that a cancellation is an inconvenience to me. This will usually take the form of an apology and will be immediately followed by one or two suggestions dates to reschedule.
Every time a flight lesson is cancelled, I have to endure the painful "When would you be free again?". My schedule has to match a.) the availability of the aircraft, and b.) the availability of the instructor. It takes 5 minutes to reschedule one single lesson and often I end up having to bend my planning or else I wouldn't be able to fly at all. And all that knowing that there's again a 33% risk to have to reschedule yet again. Every single time, this turns out into such a sticky and tedious transaction that I even ended up telling them to book me in every single morning over three weeks, leaving the topic of the lessons to be determined. And if it helps, I'm also happy to fly with any instructor.
I'm baffled. The weather in Victoria alone mandates superior scheduling skills, not grade 3 instructors behind the admin desk who just couldn't care less about generating revenues for the school. It's surprising that they do this by hand and still are so clumsy at it every time given how frequent this is happening when they teach you to be the tip of the spear when it comes to forced landings. I suggested jokingly that they hire my barber to handle their bookings. He does a marvellous job at sticking to his overloaded planning, especially on busy Saturdays, much to his clients' appreciation. It's just very unfortunate that he doesn't fly because I'd book him out for a month straight away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that running a flight school is a easy, let alone a good business to be in. But let's be fair, it just can't be that complicated to match aircraft, flight instructors and students, can it? GA is not alone by the way, most other industries also have to juggle with strict regulations. I'm just saying that while all of them are excelling at bashing CASA, it would be in their best interest to run their business more professionally for ground operations.
Today one fellow student took off one hour behind schedule because her flight instructor wasn't focused and interrupted their pre-flight brief 10 times at least. She didn't care much because she's at the school full time and, let's face it, she's a little intimidated by her instructor's epaulettes. But it did impact me directly because I was next in line to fly that aircraft. It is this poor discipline however that makes an aircraft fly 2 or 3 fewer lessons each day. It's plain frustrating to other students who have more going on in their lives than idling around at their flight school.
I am eager to learn and I am making time for it. It just seems that, being a student pilot, the first skill you truly have to master is being patient because time and money alone just won't get you in the air every day. I learned a few other things that required regular tuition from instructors, all of which were great experiences. Once the necessary skills are acquired, it's just about time to move on, no need to linger. Why would flying be any different? I'm sorry folks, but it really isn't all that hard if you have a minimum of coordination and practice regularly. There's a bloke in his late 40s who started flying 2 years ago and still hasn't flown solo. Unfortunately he can only afford to fly once a week but with all those cancellations, he's also required to do remedial flights. This lad is a
cash cow goose that lays golden eggs (a bird is still more aerodynamic than a cow) to them.
If someone cares to tell me something that I obviously don't know about the inner workings of running a flight school that may soften those hard landings, I'd be much obliged. In the meantime, let them charge students for those intermediate exams if they must. If I were them, I'd focus my energy elsewhere, eg. on building a strong reputation of getting students in and out licenced as fast as possible.