Australian Flight Training in 3 years time
 

As most of you will now be aware, the decision to be a 141 or a 142 school is upon the Flight Training Industry. The costs of stepping up to a 142 require significant expenditure. As an absolute minimum it requires a full rewrite of the current Operations Manual, and additional staffing.
I’m very interested in the impact of this, on Flight Training Organisations in Australia. I imagine that the majority of schools in Australia won’t have the funding or resources to become a 142 organisation. Those that don’t, will obviously lose the ability to deliver the 150 hour integrated course.
For a flying school in the country, or indeed a smaller city based flying school, will the loss of that revenue stream negatively impact your business, or what plans have you put in place to manage that change and minimise the impact. Will potential students from rural areas now gravitate to the larger city schools? Very keen to see if my concerns are those of industry, or am I being somewhat paranoid?

VET Fee-help is killing off the small country schools ahead of Part 141/142.

Flight instruction is something we do on weekends to prevent our charter pilots having enough duty hours for the pop-up charter job on Monday :ugh:

Glenb
I'm in Canada and about two years ago, Ontario brought in
Provincial legislation that basically overrode Federal Air Regs
with endless bureaucratic but useless requirements that
cut the number of schools doing instructor ratings from
something like 65 to 16.

It was a boost however for the other provinces.
I've been out of Aus for a long time and I had forgotten how
the Australian Bureaucratic cancer seems to always be getting worse
not better.

What I see as particularly shocking, its their ever escalating use of
their own bureaucratic language that has no purpose in the rest of the
world or society. It's a deliberate attempt to make it so complicated
that only they understand what they are talking about.

It does however open up marketing and business opportunities for those
who are able to do the translation between ordinary english and the
language of CASA.

In Ontario, each school that complies with the new expanded provincial legislation, generally is forced to employ such an expert who does nothing
but deal with the paperwork.

IN the USA, while the paperwork is incredibly long, it is however easy to understand and uses common English, expressions that CASA
would not want because it might mean that the average pilot might
understand what they are getting at.

It'll be the same aircraft operating from the same schools with different names on the sides of the same hangers with another dreamer about to lose the family home.

It's the way it's always been in general aviation in Australia, casa or otherwise.

The schools that can understand the CASA regs specifically in relation to Parts 141, 142 and especially 61 will be the winners. If they can also get hold of a good regulatory compliance manager who knows the regs inside and out to handle CASA, then the organisation should be able to survive.

Based on the projected number of new pilots that will be required globally over the next 10 years (half a million was quoted in one journal recently) there will be no shortage of work. However, the quality of training is starting to become a major concern given the ever increasing number of accidents that have been caused by basic pilot handling errors. Sadly a large majority of the new CPL holders theses days don't really have a lot of good stick and rudder skills unless they have flown a tail wheeled aircraft or done aerobatics. As a result CASA should also make it mandatory that all CPL trainees undergo some form of upset training before being issued with a CPL.

USRT
 

Agreed... It should,be mandatory for both CPL holders and within airline systems to perform upset recovery - even if there is some negative training elements from .sims without fidelity past the stall... But what do I know...

There's not really much difference between a 150 hr CPL and a 200 hr course, because almost all students do/should do additional training/ratings that take them to around 200 hrs anyway - so they could have done their training as a 200 hr course. 150 hrs might be a selling point, but only to ignorant buyers.

I'm more concerned that 142 and the 61 MOS further encourages simplistic box ticking, rather than actual skills - the same box ticking regime that has given us a collection of recent f**ing stupid crashes. The "our pilots do 1 sim session of UA each year (but are not allowed to handfly the aircraft)" approach. :ugh:

The old method did let poorer training operators slip through cracks, but the new (61/MOS/142) method won't stop that and the MOS straight-jacket discourages real training.

DrPixie
 

Drpixie, Hope your a rather civilised chap or gal, however

The "other" considerations are the economic cost to a student. Its increasingly becoming an industry where the training costs become unattainable for an increasingly larger pool of young pilots, or pilots wanting to take on a mid career change. We don't want to turn it into a career, exclusively for the well heeled.The 150 hour syllabus and the 200 hour syllabus are effectively the same regarding the Dual component. The test is after all, identical. The difference is the solo requirement. One requiring 70 hours, the other 100. Additionally the 200 hour course attracts GST. We are talking in the vicinity of an additional cost of $15,000. As you will appreciate, that's a serious amount of money

A cost effective 150 hour course could be offered within 150 hours if the solo requirement could be replaced with Dual i.e. 100 dual and 50 solo.

Im not arguing that it is the most important consideration. But it is a consideration. Not sure what the answer is, but would 20 hours additional dual, be less safe than 20 hours of solo? Its a question of the safety benefit for the economic argument. It could even just be, good old "common sense"

The overriding factor of course is that CASA has absolutlely NO interest In the affordabilitybof a licence qualification nor the quality of the product ( pilot) that is produced. Strict compliance is the aim, and complete dingbats are employed to use thier tunnel vision and lack of any industry knowledge to enforce stupid, pointless and expensive compliance systems.

Good on them for having no real interest in avaiation safety. They are scum of the lowest order and deserve no respect. If you think they are generally a bunch of good guys just doing their job, you are one of those yet to be selected for thier special type of authoretarian arrogance and persecution.your time will come if you try hard to do your job properly. They will track you down and hound you to hell.

They can all rot in hell for their pernicious and overblown sense of rightuosness and nasty natures.

They will insist on pointless rigid compliance systems with no positive safety outcomes for an AWK operation, yet are advocating scenic flights with no AOC in a clapped out old 172/206 with virtually no oversight, which they will justify by saying, well it's all within regs thatvrequire no audit, so it's none of our business, we must go and harrass someone who must comply with some rules. Safety, pah, has nothing to do with it.

Bottom dwelling, scum sucking, brainless gits. Shoot them all on sight. We will all have better safety outcomes,with a modicum of affordability,

HD

You only have to take a look at the ratio of dual to solo hours 40 years ago. Then it was normal to see a pilot's log book showing 50 total flying hours which included 30 solo. Now you will see a typical spread of 50 total flying hours which include maybe 10 solo. It is solo hours that are most important because that means decision making time. Once a pilot completes his first solo it used to be normal that each following dual hour would be followed by one solo hour as the student consolidated what he had been taught in the previous dual session.

I have frequently seen student log books where after first solo, the next 5-8 hours are dual followed by another short solo and so the ratio of dual to solo steadily seems to increase in favour of dual. Often this is due to some instructors "milking" the hapless student to pick up more money and/or to fill his own log book. CFI's will either know what is going on but keep quiet because it is money going into flying school coffers. Or they fail to closely supervise the instructors while the student gets stitched up with more dual. Usually the latter.

Glenb, I have to admit that the GST is significant to the student. But it's not really a direct effect of 150/200 hrs, it's the tax system saying "this is training" but "that one over there, that's not" irrespective of whether the recipient ever earns an income.

I think you will find these '150 hour CPL courses' at the big part 142 schools will cost a hell of a lot more than the typical '200 hour CPL' at a small school.

Not the other way round...

Don't think the small schools have anything to worry about, particularly if this HECS thing drys up.

Woah hang on a minute! $150k for a pay as you go, non full time, stretched out CPL? 200hrs at ~$300/hr on average (including solo time) means 60k tops, no more than $6k in GST

When the big schools and 'cadetships' charge $150k you can be sure they've added the 10% back in to that price so they don't miss out on your money! Oh My! What a saving!

Anyone who does any research before making such a life changing decision would soon realise which is the more sound approach. It's just a shame kids these days don't and get sucked in to glossy brochures and massive mortgage sized student loans (ie. Free flying training!).

The predictions of global pilot demand are essentially simplistic, pie in the sky, marketing garbage.

GA in Australia is in slow, steady decline. It is already ridiculously expensive to learn to fly in Australia, and the product is not of any higher quality than that produced at a much cheaper rate in the US. As with many other Australian industries, flight training will be strangled as increasing government regulation makes it un-competitive in the global market.

What is the cost of a 0-150 hour CPL, full time or strrreeeeetch it out?

How many students actually go for test in exactly 150 hours?

How many start and never finish a CPL, or even a PPL, but have dodged tax?

How many people are able to land a job with just 70 hours in command and 150 total?

I know how much I can put someone from 0-200 hours through in and it's nowhere near $150K.

It's really an academic argument. No matter how much invested, the prospects of a job are few and far between. One that provides a liveable wage is even more rare. They holy grail airline job hasn't been advertised for about 5 years, unless you already work for one. A330 type rated only thank you.

So what's the point? It's like buying a broken down car, it costs money and will never get you anywhere. Flying schools pumping out pilots on VET-fee help might make money but where are all these pilots going to go? An already saturated industry where regionals are closing down once a month?

Oh, and the 150 hour course is only GST free if your dodgy flying school doesn't refuse to refund it.

Nomde Plume
 

For clarification, my calculation of an additional $15,000 was based on both the requirement of the additional 30 hours solo, and the GST being applied to all training from that's not under a 150 hr syllabus.

Nomde plume said:
"Don't think the small schools have anything to worry about, particularly if this HECS thing drys up."

VET Fee help can't dry up quickly enough IMO.

Despite our CPL 200 hour course being approximately $25K less than the 'big school' near us, we invariably missed the business because they have VET Fee help and we didn't.

This is one of the reasons that our school ceased trading this week and I am out of a job.

Centaurus

This has been the subject of other threads, but if I may I would offer a possible alternative explanation:

The overall aptitude of pilot trainees seems to be diminishing with very few people being hands-on "how does this work?" types. The instructors are often under pressure (internal or student-applied or employer-applied) to send a stude solo so the student can "make progress" ...despite their lack of progress.

That box ticked, the stude then needs a fill of more dual because they have passed the bar, and slacked off.

Alternately they go solo (however deservingly) and then don't fly for weeks.

I can't say I know of many CFIs who are so venal as to milk students, but then I only get to speak to other small-school CFIs.

Sorry to hear that, ravan.

Fee help has defintely skewed the flying training industry, it is difficult to compete with an organisation that lures students with "free flying" even though my 200 hour CPLs are finished and working in the industry having spent considerably less than the $96,000 fee help to get from go to whoa.

Even with all that advantage over the competition one school at Jandakot who were offering the fee help still ended up closing their doors a couple of months ago.

glenb I have a GST ruling on CPL training for the 200 hour course but not going to go into details here. Suffice to say that someone going for the 200 hours does not have to pay GST on certain parts of the training if they have proved they are a bona fide CPL student and not just Bloggs trying to blag 10% off a PPL.

I think the GST should be refunded when the student finishes the course and gets the qualification, rather than not applied to the training at all.