I have a fairly basic question.
Where will a "proper wage" (whatever it may be) come from?
It can come only from customers. Where/how will a school get the customers?
If instructors were severely underpaid, but the customers are there, that would imply that anybody owning a school is making loads of money. I don't see anybody who owns a school making loads of money.
Now let's say you fill a school with excellent instructors. Is this going to generate much more money for the school? I don't think so - the only way that would happen is much later down the road, when a lot of pilot graduates find that the excellent tuition they got (which went way beyond the PPL syllabus
) has enabled them to get much more out of their piece of paper, so they hang around the airfield, the whole scene becomes busier and more attractive for others to hang around in, etc. Nobody is going to look that far ahead.
At the last school I trained (2002, IMCR) the instructors got a £10/day retainer and about £20 per flying hour. Obviously they were ATPL hour builders. Nobody made money at that school; in fact at the very end the owner lost 6 figures through fraud.