Apples, Oranges, and Flight Training Most general aviation accidents are a result of pilot error. Numbers are around 75%, depending on how you look at things. Of those accidents, roughly 80% of those had a skill-based component to them. In other words, the pilots’ skills weren’t up to the task. Accidents are expensive. They can result in aircraft damage, injuries and even death. Death not just for the pilot, but for the people trusting their lives to the pilot. One of the best ways to prevent accidents and their aftermath is to get good training and to stayed trained up. That is why the faa requires pilot training in the first place and regular flight reviews for pilots continuing to fly. The faa’s goal is not to annoy pilots or increase barriers to aviation. The goal is safety, pure and simple. And it is well known that the airlines and insurance companies for air carriers require even more training than the faa does for the pilots who pursue flying careers. It is almost as well known that the number of accidents in air carriers is well below the numbers of accidents in general aviation, probably because of that extra training. We should all be pursuing training in order to be safe, not because the faa requires a minimum amount of training. In fact, with the obvious benefits there are to training, flight instructors should be kept pretty busy. So it is somewhat alarming that we have so few flight instructors in aviation, particularly sport aviation. And if you want to put a finer point on it, we have far fewer good flight instructors than we need in order to grow the sport. Oh, yes. And to be safe! So why don’t we have more flight instructors? The simple answer is that it does not pay to be a flight instructor. If a profession is financially rewarding, then more people will pursue it. That is simple economics. The important question to ask is why doesn’t it pay to be a flight instructor? Unfortunately, that is a complicated question to answer. But of course I’m going to try. There are a few factors, actually. We will talk about two. 1) Flight Instructors don’t price themselves appropriately. Truth is, most flight instruction for sport aviation is from independent operators, independent businesses. It is up to the individual instructors to value the service they are providing. If you only ask for $50 per hour, then you will only get $50 per hour. That is the way it works. And for those of you thinking that $50 an hour is great compensation, you don’t have any idea what it takes to earn that simple $50! To put it in perspective, a college professor makes roughly $50 per hour. But he gets that $50 per hour whether he is teaching, preparing to teach, sitting in his office tugging on his beard, or on vacation. Annually, the average compensation package is north of $125,000 per year. Not many cfi’s are pulling down that kind of salary with flight instruction. 2) Students don’t value flight instruction. Despite the obvious benefits as far as safety and achieving a rating go, students often just do not believe that instruction should cost as much as it does. But let’s look at this from the other side of the equation. If you compare getting a sport pilot license with a college course, the math works out like this. Reasonably, you are going to spend about three hours with a flight instructor for every hour of actual flight instruction. For an airplane rating, that means about 60 hours total with your flight instructor. Some of it flying, much of it preflight, and postflight training. A credit hour in college is about 16 hours of lecture. Let’s call that four credit hours. A four credit hour course in the college I graduated from would cost you nowadays $3,400. Not too bad, eh? However, for that $3,400 you are going to be sharing your instructor with about ten other students. So you have to multiply that cost by at least ten. Meaning you would be paying roughly $34,000 for a sport pilot rating at university prices. Don’t like that math? Let’s just look at what it takes to get a commercial driver’s license to drive a big truck or a bus. The price for that is $3,000-$8,000. And remember, that is just the equivalent of ‘transition training’ since anyone attending is already expected to know how to drive a car! Truth is, training is not only required, it not only helps keep you safe, it also is underpriced in the aviation world.
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