Although the training industry has picked up recently frankly its still on its ass. Today on what I can only describe as a superb flying day my local RTF doesn’t have a single booking.
At the local regional airport a flying school has just closed as the owner reached 70 and couldn’t find anyone to take it over. At one point he used to offer CPL and IR training and had something like 4 instructors working for him. For the last 10 years he has only offered PPL training and has just worked on his own.
If we go back say 15 years that airfield had a total of 5 schools based there. Two of which offered CPL and IR training. As we stand today it has two with one of them only having one aircraft and the nearest CPL school is 59 miles away. Frankly the place is dead.
25 miles away at another airfield the only school their has recently closed its “group A” operation however it will continue to offer microlight training. But again the place is dead. The cafe that used to open all week cut its hours down to weekends only and for the last 12 months it been closed.
I feel that something needs to be done if not to reverse this trend but at least to try and holt any further fall.
I can teach for the CPL and I am an IRI too. The local RTF also has an IRR/IRE/FIC on staff and another one of the instructors also teaches for the CPL and IR as well.
Now the CBIR has been a shot in the arm for the RTF as it has trained two students for their CBIR’s. And they made great savings with both of them requiring 17 additinal hours training at an ATO. Unfortunately this meant one of them having a commute of 134 miles a day. The other traveled 1600 miles to do it.
Now at the end of the day the candidate has to pass the same exam if they go via the CBIR route or the traditional IR route. So how about EASA simply got rid of all ATO course approvals and simply allowed any instructor who is suitable qualified to teach for license or rating.
This is how it used to be and I’m pretty sure is how it is in the states. Doing away with company approvals would bring great savings in time and money to ATO’s and I would like to think open up more local training opportunities.
As you say, freelance PPL instructing was possible – in the UK at least – until about the 1980s, and always has been possible in the USA up to the CPL/IR level (even the ATP used to be until recently), but some people wanted it stopped.
I suppose the other side of the argument is that if you allow training to be set up “too easily” you get the Shoreham situation of 15 years ago where there were 8 fixed wing schools, each eating each other’s lunch because the PPL training market is nearly always too small.
Consequently many people in the training business actually want it to be harder to do it because it keeps competition out, especially the “old man in a wooden hut” who with his shagged C150 will undercut everybody. They just won’t write it in quite these terms openly 
but you can be sure as hell they lobby the CAA for it.
A search for “freelance” digs out some good old threads…
Regulations aren’t supposed to be there to protect ATO monopolies at airfields. It should be possible to do all training at least up to CPL and IR with a freelance instructor.
It works very well in the USA.
I only wish the LAA would push hard for this. The LAA is always crowing on about how they make owning an aircraft more affordable, but that’s no use if the training is still unaffordable. The recent concession to allow ab-initio training in permit aircraft is great, but it’s utterly useless without freelance instructors able to do it, because there are going to be vanishingly few ATOs who will train you in your own permit machine.
The only thing EASA need to do, is to put the pilots first. It’s the only thing that makes sense safety wise and organisational vise, and it’s the only thing that will get people flying. But they cannot do it, they are incapable, they just don’t get it. It’s like the concept is out of reach to them. Who cares about instructors fighting because there are too many of them? That’s the real world, and it’s the same in all industries.
Cost wise I don’t think PPL training is expensive because of the flight training. Or maybe my training is a lucky exception?
My FI gets 30€ an hour. The plane costs 150€ an hour wet. Club membership is 360€/annum. Landing fees are 2,50€ at my home field. The theory lessons cost me 750€. The theory exam was 130€ for the lower saxon CAA. The R/T exam cost was 80€. The class 2 medical was 140€ IIRC.
All added together is supposedly around 10000€. I have not yet added the figures. But the FI at say 30×30€ (assuming the remaining 15 hours were solo time) only makes up 900€, which is a tenth of the cost. Not really a game changer do you think? The plane and fuel seem to make up most of the cost.
MedEwok wrote:
My FI gets 30€ an hour.
Lucky bastard!
@what_next
Indeed. It is more than my hourly rate 
Still I don’t think making the instruction cheaper would have a significant effect on the number of PPL students. The flying itself is too dqmn expensive.
MedEwok wrote:
Indeed. It is more than my hourly rate
I don’t really know what the going rate for PPL instruction is around here (can’t afford to do it myself as the pay does not cover the cost of driving to the airport and the parking fees) but certainly not above 20 Euros. Mind you, those 20 Euros are paid per flying hour only. Flight planning, briefing, debriefing, the cup of coffee in between pattern training to calm the student’s nerves and everything else is not generating any income for the instructor. And from that, the instructor is supposed to pay taxes, healthcare and everything else. This is really only for desperate hour builders and no wonder PPL instruction tends to be very sub-standard in many places. Pay peanuts, get monkeys… I don’t think for a moment that freelance instruction (which was never possible in Germany except for class- and typeratings – but not any more now) would be better for the instructors. On the contrary. The students/plane owners would rather expect that flying instruction is some favor they can ask from their instructor buddies – after all, they enable them an afternoon of FREE flying on their wonderful Bonanza or Cirrus. At least that’s what it used to be when I instructed differences training and multi-engine ratings as freelancer when it was still possible. Pathetic.
MedEwok wrote:
My FI gets 30€ an hour.
what_next wrote:
Lucky bastard!
MedEwok wrote:
Indeed. It is more than my hourly rate
Well, I guess it depends on if you are sending the student an invoice or if you are employed by the flight school but that is not a high enough salary to have a sustainable “fleet” of instructors. For every hour you fly, you will be on the ground at least 1,5-2 hours.
I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned the DTO. The DTO will come into force fairly soon and it will help a lot. It will be a lot easier to start a “one-man/woman-flightschool” and it is probably as close as you will get to complete freelance for a while to come. If we can get the new Basic IR under the scope of the DTO, we have something really good to take advantage of.
We need to stop complaining and start flying.
What is DTO if you don’t mind asking?
