bedrock

I hear what JohnBurke is saying, but how many professional industries rely on experienced, professional employees by having them simply meander from job to job, hoping for and conniving ways to get that experience? Does Mercedes-Benz hire mechanics and assemblyline workers this way? Are medical professionals educated and groomed this way? Does the US military find pilots this way?

I think these symposiums are right when they say more structure needs to exist in the training pipeline for this career. We have to change the way we think in the US about "dues earning" and "rugged individualism"; this doesn't wash in an increasingly high-tech globally competitive society. In fact, i don't think any first world country has as bad of a directionless education system as the US. I don't know of anywhere else where students are told to just get a degree and then wind up working somewhere totally out of their field.

With all this said, there is no substitute for experience in this career. Airlines don't want to pay for it and in the past the military supplied it. Also in the past, there were no regionals; if you couldn't afford to fly, you took Greyhound. Maybe we need to think about aviation training using the merchant marine academy example.

Fluglehrer

Is it a Ponzi scheme? Ultimately, yes, just like professional sports is a Ponzi scheme. There are only a few who make it to the show, out of a large number who play in college, semi-pro, etc.
There will be a number of folks who earn a commercial license but who won't ever really make a living from flying. That's just life, there is a lot of leftover slag after making iron. The process of producing pilots is inherently wasteful, the separating of wheat from chaff, the separating of capable pilots from those who paid $50,000 for a nice wall decoration. I do believe the majority who earn a commercial license will make their living flying, but I don't believe it is a "vast majority".
I think it will be a problem for new CFIs to find a job in a year or so. New CFIs will need a few years to earn their 1000+ hours, and to earn those hours each CFI will need to train more than five students. Then one of those trained students will replace the CFI. Are there enough other time-building jobs to absorb the other four students? I don't believe so, but I think the cream will rise to the top. Good students who become good CFIs will get the available CFI jobs. Many of them will have John Burke's determination. Many others won't, and will find other paths to success outside of aviation. Such is life.

JohnBurke

Perhaps you simply haven't been there and done that, and therefore, wouldn't know.

Otherwise, you might attempt to contribute to the conversation, if you're able.

I don't know where Mercedez-Benz gets it's mechanics. Where to most auto workers come from? Off the street with little or no training. It doesn't take an extensive education to put the seat in a car all day every day for 20 years. Medical professionals are groomed this way; the medical professional obtains his or her training and his own expense, then seeks work, putting in long hours of residency, and ongoing training for many years to come. Does the military find it's pilots this way? Yes. Pilots compete for the opportunity, and then the taxpayer buys their actual training.

Airlines aren't expected to do that, and the airlines don't work the same way that the military does.

Who owes a prospective pilot candidate anything? If you want to learn to fly, it's all on you.

It has nothing to do with paying your dues. It has to do with entitlement. Nobody is entitled to a career as a pilot. No one is obligated to pump students to an instructor until he's done using the school and moves on with his career.

A student wants to have a career, who owes him or her a dime, or a student, or an hour?

Some airlines around the world pay for all the training for their students. Some students get in far over their head: a typical chinese contract for a chinese student is a 99 year term; the student owes 99 years of his life upon completing training. If the airline doesn't use him as a pilot, he still owes the years, whether it's sweeping hangars or scrubbing toilets. Other airlines have ab initio programs. In the USA, there is no shortage of available, qualified aviator applicants for major airline positions. The regionals struggle more, as they aren't willing to pay much. Never the less, there are ample pilots and there's no need for ab initio training, nor a likelihood to see it develop as a standard practice domestically.

Those who feel the world owes them a living, who feel they're entitled, those are the type that want a pipeline provided to them. When the sun rises, however, in the light of day, the hard cold truth is that nobody owes them anything. Dues? No. Lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps and making their way like an adult? Yes, you bet.

Fluglehrer

This is a pretty good explanation for how we have built up over $1 Trillion in student loan debt, with a 14% default rate. Consider it the additional premium for liberty. America is a tough town, or as Sgt Stryker said:

bedrock

OK, you didn't understand anything I stated and instead jumped on a libertarian soap box. Mercedes (at least in Germany) does not hire mechanics off the street, they go through organized and structured training and apprenticeships, the assembly line workers are constantly trained and moved up with experience. Under the "free mkt" (it can't exist, esp. in the airlines for safety reasons), we had 250 hr wet commercial pilots in the right seat of airliners--basically learning on the job at 450 kts with people in the back. There is no way that should happen. Pilots need time to gain experience and more importantly to be PIC. Now, we have the govt. saying 1500 hrs is required, but there is no structured way to achieve it, why should aviation be run like a pirate ship. Right now, the best and most capable aren't necessarily the one's becoming airline pilots, it is the one's with the money. It is a chaotic approach, which is needlessly wasteful.

Flightcap

As to the question of whether there is enough demand for training to satisfy the supply, the OP doesn't have a sound enough understanding of what is actually happening in instructing.

I work at a well-known university 141 program in Ohio. I've been working here since 2013 and our instructional staff has COMPLETELY turned over (I'm the most senior instructor except for the Chief). We also are down from 20 instructors to 16. This is despite increased hiring activity and, for the first time in years, widespread interviewing of outside applicants. Additionally, student enrollment is higher than it's been since 2007. This is a typical story for flight training operations in our area. There is absolutely no way, in the short term, that we are going to work through this demand in a couple of months.

By the way, schools as far away as California have been calling offering to pay for a CFI's relocation costs and give them a signing bonus since they are in the same boat.

The primary causal factor is the airline hiring climate. Post-2008, many instructors were stuck in the CFI world until upwards of 3000 TT (which with Ohio weather can be a seven-year slog!). Today, the moment a CFI reaches R-ATP mins they have job offers from multiple airlines and are gone. The training supply is limited by the fact that all those "active" certificates are actually turning into airline pilots much faster than in the past many years.

JohnBurke

I understood everything you said. You've just repeated yourself. I understood that too.

Again, nobody owes you or anyone else a pathway to a career.

Yes, the government is telling you that 1,500 hours is required to fly for an airline. This means nothing, and is in fact the same number that's required to obtain an AIRLINE transport pilot certificate. One needs an ATP to fly an ATP job Shocking. As stated, for many of us, it took a lot more than that to be considered, and we all managed to find other work (as previously described) to get there. The same can be done today. The fast ride is over.

Get used to it. Again.

1,500 hours is an insignificant number. If you or anyone else chooses to obtain that minimal experience only through flight instruction, that's your choice. Nobody owes you the students, or a "structured path" to get that experience. It's your career. Make your way. What auto workers in germany do is irrelevant. It's your career. Your problem. Act accordingly.

Cubdriver

Getting back to the statistics question, you (the OP) came up with some ratios that are indeterminate. Active CFIs/inactive CFIs is an unknown ratio at both sample points. If I say 1/x is to be divided by 1/y, all I have is y/x. If you were trying to normalize out the active CFI/inactive CFI ratio, great idea but that won't do it because the normalization quantity has to be known or at least be the same variable. For example, in aerodynamics we like to normalize things as much as possible to allow apples-to-apples comparisons without extraneous stuff riding along. The most common example is to divide everything by dynamic pressure (q) to get that out of it, because q is q no matter where it turns up.

-----------------

I think this is an apparent dilemma only. Someone said that historically pilots had >2500 hours to go to work at a regional, which I hear was the case until maybe ten years ago. So having to slog through the traffic pattern with an English-mangling student all day is no big deal if the previous number was 2500 anyway. It's was always a hard profession to get into unless you were either a crook who falsifies logs, or a military aviator who was granted an exemption. It is true the acceptance criteria got lower by the late 2000s when 250 hour wonders started turning up, but the washout rates got ridiculous and it was pushed back by Congress anyway. Was the ATP rule right or wrong is another topic for discussion.

GVGUY

I haven't renewed my CFI in ten years and haven't had a need to use it.

USMCFLYR

Since this entire paragraph seems to be about the past, what exemption criteria are you referring too in the sentence bolded above?