As one of those operators, who love to give new pilots a start and see them grow, the sad fact that one of the reasons for me getting out of Aviation is the quality of VET students that we were receiving in the past few years and the lack of skills in stick and rudder and basic navigation. I never in the past had a reason to distrust a pilot that we sent off into the desert to do a charter, but even after hours of ICUS silly mistakes were still being made that eroded that trust.
With new pilot applications, I ended up with the first questions i asked was, are you self funded and as a kid did you ever build a model aircraft?
The reason was if they took the VET option it would mean we had a flag to access basic skills, and if you wanted to build a model aircraft as a kid your fascination with aviation wasn't a recent thing, but probably they have been researching flight most of their life and have a bigger picture of aviation and basic flight.
The VET fees turned flight training schools into sausage factories, flight training become, I feel, a free for all, a grab for money at the expense of good solid training.
Flight training skills from the VET accredited Orgs in general, declined as they pushed to get pilots out on a budget not their skills. The unprecedented demand for flight training meant new instructors are being brought to line by the company that trained them with very little or no commercial experience. The end result was we, as a commercial operator were having to spend double the ICUS time to check to line a pilot who in general, would panic at the sight of a dirt strip, couldn't handle a crosswind and knew nothing about carby icing, apart from once covering it in a theory class just to mention a few of the issues.
As a side note I feel as a bare minim a basic requirement to start a course to be an instructor they should have at least 1000 hours command time of commercial experience. That way the instructor has the tales and understanding of a commercial environment that they can pass onto the potential commercial pilot.
The number of resumes we started getting since introduction of VET,increased 10 fold however the number of hangar visits declined. The attitude changed from can you hire me, to why wouldn't you want to hire me?
Generally the self funded students that we interviewed still seemed to have the basic skills we always required, mainly due to the fact that flying was their passion, they walked talked lived flying and really had no end goal in sight, but to fly as many aircraft as they can and I have worked 2 to 3 jobs to follow my dream and I am going to be the best I can be. Most it seemed flying was a lifestyle choice not a parental push or a chance for an ego trip.
VET fees may have helped a few dedicated stragglers like the ones i have described above, but the bigger picture here, was that it seems some unscrupulous training orgs just seen the quick grab for cash, expanded quickly and pushed kids, that didn't have it in their heart to become a pilot and push themselves to extra self study. VET fees seemed to encourage the view that they will all pass no matter their eventual different skill levels. Dont rock the boat or we all loose was a feeling I got when I questioned past students about this.
The cynical side of me also thinks the bad training Orgs were happy to just wander along and if students didn't get to standard by just completing the basic mandated course, that would mean they would require extra time and a double dip at the end of the course, however I would hate to think that is the case.
Its a shame that we had to have a black book of training orgs we wouldn't hire from, as time after time the same bad habits appeared in flight checks from the same schools and the fact that our CP even rang some of these schools to say WTF guys, only to have the absolute denial that their students were nothing but first rate. We checked a heap of kids from many different schools sometimes in recent years it would take 20 check rides to get suitable newbie were 20 years ago you would do 5 and have to procrastinate between 4 of them as they were equally as good if not better than our requirements.
What has happened to the skills assessment audits. From my understanding of what I have been told the VET system trainers received the VET fee upfront in full. I maybe wrong and stand to be corrected. If so why wasn't the fee only paid in stages and the pilots skills independently audited before allowing them to progress to the next stage and their next lot of VET funds? That would start the alarm bells ringing a lot earlier and stopped this grab for cash and brought back performance based funding for both the trainee and the trainer and may have saved both the Government a whole lot of money, the trainee a life long debt for a substandard skill that makes them unemployable in a declining GA market.
It leaves a shrinking GA industry with a massive oversupply of potential pilots and in an industry already with other massive regulatory imposed burdens, with having to spend valuable airtime and check and training time just to get a pilot to line.
In my online research of Org in question, with info freely available with a couple of very quick searches, and the documentation provide by the students online, scarily it seems all my points above are verified by the online information .
If this company has lost their accreditation after being investigated by the Australian Skills Quality Authority, good riddance, then how many others are out there, not only in our industry but across the whole skills training industry. This whole debacle should be investigated by four corners or a similar reputable media, they should all be named and shamed and potentially brought to justice for claiming money that they were untitled to, and at the end, bringing a question to the industry of how safe are we now, are all operators out there as pedantic as we were getting a newbie to line? Maybe not, have all our aircraft been maintained by engineers that have a skill level that ensures our aircraft wont fall apart in flight due to poor training as proved by the TAFE debacle, maybe not.
At the end where is CASA in all this, surely they can see the decline in the industry, they must be auditing these training orgs, why did it take the Australian Skills Quality Authority to clip their wings with a big question mark, or are CASA all to busy behind a desk rewriting the regulations yet again????????
Mick