4dogs
It did blow out to those hours for various reasons during the China Eastern Pilot scheme and the results are still being monitored although some say the results are useless now in terms of assessing future effectiveness because the hours blew out so much. You would need to monitor cadets achieving the standard in the designed hours to have a effective evaluation.
As to the costs, it is about the same cost - to the cadet!!! Ask him about his costs and he should tell you it does not cost him as much to run. Sure he has significant capital expenditure in simulators and the cost of a High capacity RPT aircraft (as far as i am aware only aircraft in world eligible to be used for mpl are 737, A320 and Q400) to do 12 circuits but his variable costs such as fuel, maintenance and of course the aircraft fleet itself are much reduced as is his business risk of poor unflyable weather etc. Capital costs can be written off against student numbers, the more students through the door the cheaper the cost per hour, eventually the utopia being that the sim is paid for through sufficient student numbers or depreciated in the accounts against tax and much of the course fees paid by students will be profit. Do you think training prices will decrease over time to reflect these efficiencies?
Let's try and put some scale to this. Swinburne stated it had a total of 256 enrolled in training at the present time, it does not have it's own flight training facilities so lets assume it sub-contracts this element of the course to Oxford. So I will not include Oxford's own students to even things up. I assume that this number is pretty constant and that the course lasts 18 months. At $200k a pop (on the basis that swinburne makes its money from commonwealth grants etc.) that is $34million worth of business per year. Now i know they have running costs such as staff costs etc. But i would imagine it is more than enough to cover the purchase of an a320 and a few sims and write them off over a few years!!
So you see this is all about profit and the bottom line.
I learnt this lesson from an old company chairman, a man I consider as perhaps one of the most influential characters in my working life. Early in my career he asked me "what do Cadburys make". With a puzzled look I replied "chocolate!". To which he barked back at me " no son chocolate is the byproduct, they make f***ing money and that is what we are here to make". He went on to teach me the art of 'milking people with warm hands' as he put it.
As you allude to in your last post the devil is in the detail. As far as I am aware there is no such thing as a fixed price contract for 'privately funded' aviation training in Australia. I qualify this as I know of commercial arrangements between two organizations, an airline and a FTO that spit cadet out for a fixed price lump sum per cadet.
Do you think the JQ Cadet course is fixed price? Well it is not, they have a clause in the Oxford training agreement (yes I know another bloody contract) that has words to the effect of price based on minimum hours to achieve the required standard and any additional hours required must be paid as extra by the cadet etc. Etc. To be fair to Oxford, most flight training organizations have this. In anycase JQ have this well covered in their funding agreement where it allows them to unilaterally increase the cadet training costs without requiring approval from the cadet. A license to print money, effectively by signing this the cadet has written a blank cheque without realizing. But that is GEN Y all over!!
So now you see how FTOs manage the business risk of allowing anyone willing to walk through the door and part with lots and lots of their hard earned and teach them to fly. In the same way they are able to manage the risk of poor instruction from their Instructors, simple blame it on the student and make 'em pay. This is not business!!
Businesses, first class ones anyway, have confidence in the abilities in their staff to deliver a product or service so much so that they are able to offer a fixed price.
4dogs, as I said in my last post Petteford is a salesman and he tried peddling his goods to the Senators thinking that they were gen Ys with shiner white jet syndrome. Hopefully they were not thinking of buying!
As I have posted previously this is one such example of where the evidence has been tainted to protect and safeguard the commercial interests of the companies they represent rather than focus on what is important which is the safe skies of Australia.
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The Kelpie
Last edited by The Kelpie; 9th Mar 2011 at 22:13.