IAA Mildura
 

Anyone know what is happening with IAA at Mildura? What with China southern closing its doors in WA, is IAA likely to get more students from China when international students are allowed back in to Australia?

Will be interesting to see if that happens! Can't imagine the residents against the school will be too happy

Will they be happy at the loss of skilled jobs from country towns? The closure of CSWAFC will have a disproportionate effect on it’s smaller resident town but any closure in these economic times is not a good thing. Not just the loss of skilled professional jobs but also foreign students with some amount of spare cash who would rent accomodation, buy supplies and eat out at local restaurants.

My understanding is they haven’t operated out of Merredin for the last few years and has only been Jandakot.

Can confirm the remaining 50 odd students are off to Mangalore to complete their training.

Thread drift here. My concern is for the operation at Mildura. A lot of time, money and effort has gone into setting the Mildura operation up.

Last I heard, its a waiting game for when new cadets can arrive from China

There ar any number of businesses that can be established virtually overnight. They have relatively small capital costs and lease or rent their equipment and premises. They sell product that is transaction based. There is no repeat business. Boat building, construction and education, including flight training, fall into this category.

Businesses with such characteristics are a mecca for shonky operators.

I din't know All the truths from rumours but, I have not come across a single person that has anything good to say about this place. If only half Of it is true this place Must be One Of the worst managed aviation businesses in Australia.

IAA claim to have MOU's with Air China, China Southern and Hebei Airlines pending the opening of boarders - in addition to their current contracts with China Eastern, Sichuan and Shenzhen Airlines. They are still around making inquiries with for future second and third bases.

As others have said the place is messy, needs big management improvement. Have the new aircraft and the contracts which many schools would die for but need better leadership.

Now that international students are trickling back into Australia, given the current geopolitical situation, is there any likelihood, in the new year, of a return to flying operations for IAA at Mildura?

It looks like Mangalore are shutting for the same reasons as IAA

Ah, Australia's biz guru from the dark side of the Moon awakens in 2022...

Maybe Sunfish is right about some operators but the Mildura operation has invested some 100 million plus dollars. Seems like a lot of money to not worry about continuing their business.

I wouldn’t personally be taking my business advice from Sunfish !

You might want to check the date ....

Chinese govt isn't letting their students come to Australia at this stage (yay politics). Hence why Oxford, Mangalore, IAA are all struggling. Hopefully things change and we can see an improvement

They can get out but they can’t get back again! China is still going for a zero Covid target to the detriment of the whole country. So many, including myself, want/need to go there for business purposes and it’s not looking like it will happen any time soon.

IAA Mildura
 

The lack of students must be a disaster for the big schools geared for bulk foreign student training. Not talked about in the media spin is the effect that it has had on instructors. When Covid struck and no more students were allowed into the country. The existing students were trained to the licence standard and sent home. As the numbers of students dwindled the need for instructors declined. First the Grade 3 instructors were dispensed with. Then the Grade 2 instructors. That left the Grade 1 instructors. A bare skeleton hoping for the day that Covid would disappear and that student numbers would increase and the Grade 1 instructors could be used to expand the said school again. Wishful thinking.
A lot of those fired or furloughed instructors will never return to instructing. They will have gone to other jobs that are a continuing venue of employment and probably better pay scales.
Even if Covid vanished overnight and OS students rolled back into the country there would be the aspect of getting enough of the right instructors to re-start the school. The G1's would have to retrain and oversee the G3 and G2 instructors that would need to be hired or re-hired.
Rusty instructors would need to be brought back into line and no doubt there would be a few 'incidents' as the airlines are finding out. The expression 'if you don't use it you lose it' comes to mind in regard to pilot skills.
From the overseas camp one can see that in say 10 years time the likes of China will have got rid of enough smog and build more GA type airports to be able to be used to train their own pilots in their own country. That might leave the big Australian schools high and dry.
But the good side to this is that the Chinese may want to have Australian instructors on a short term contract to raise the level of flight skills in that country.
All food for thought.
Comments?

Having spent a lot of time instructing I have no sympathy for the large flying schools/colleges etc. They all prey on new instructors for cheap labor and when you ask for more they use the old " we can shake a tree and replace you" mantra. If these companies had any interest in quality training over making quick cash on the back of a need for mass training then I would care a little bit, like the tip of my little toe, maybe on the left foot. As for most of whats left now, just big sausage factories with no ambition other than to produce the cheapest product in the shortest time and pay the least for monkeys that just shovel the crap through. BTW I was involved to the point I was putting forward pay ideas based on skill retention with actual data on how much a skilled grade 1 saved over employing mainly untested grade 3s. Kept getting answers like, yeah but they will get lazy if we pay them more and hours wont change, or they will still leave etc etc. All that on the back of solid evidence of significant reduction in flight training hours for experience, we are talking tens of thousands of dollars over a year of savings. But of course, the big colleges don't care, they get paid by the hour so the rot continues....

Anyone know if this place will be starting back up?