JohnBurke

Where is the implied promise?

Here is our school. Here are our rates. Here are the costs. Here are the requirements to earn certification. You'll nearly certainly require more time and expense than the minimum, but that's up to you. Here are things you can do with that certification. We may offer to hire you as an instructor, or we may not. That's up to you as well.

Not really an implied promise, but possibilities, all up to the student.

Regionals, commuters; these have always been the bottom rung, the entry level job. There were times in the past when one needed considerable flight time to apply even to those. The pay was always abysmal. Those who seek those positions, however, do so in their own self-interests. They're willing to accept the wages to get their "hours." Their choice.

There is nothing in the world of flight schools and instructions that meets the definition of a ponzi scheme, or a pyramid scheme. One would need to have a scheme, first, and there is none. There's no plan, no conspiracy, no master agenda. Instruction doesn't exist on the basis of making airline pilots. It exists on the basis of providing instruction...to recreational, sport, private, commercial, and ATP pilots, as well as providing float instruction, tailwheel training, instrument ratings, balloon and glider experience, and so on.

The narrow mentality sees the path to airlines as the main thrust of the industry. The aviation world revolves around the airlines, they think. It does not.

There are less than honorable companies in the industry. This is true of any industry. There are companies that charge for their jobs; only those who pay get hired. The sad sapsuckers who prostrate themselves for these bottom feeders deserve no compassion; it's all them; all their own choice. There are companies that have instituted tier systems in the pay, that do seek to cull those who have been at the company too long; why would anyone want to work for such a company?

I have stood in the front ranks of the union and gone toe to toe with management over those issues and others. It's not just regionals; UPS management is a shining example of what can happen, even within a well respected global airline. Mention Eastern Airlines today and see the reaction among those of us old enough to know. We know. There are bad applies to be found high and low. I was once told by an employer, when I demanded the raise that had been promised, that I should consider myself fortunate to be paid anything. In fact, the employer told me, for the education that I was getting on the job, by all rights I should have been paying him.

I quit.

Don't like your job in aviation? Cry about it, invent imaginary conspiracy themes, or find a job that you do like. It's simple. Do I feel compassion for those who select jobs that treat employees badly, or that pay poorly? Lest one forget I've worked up through the ranks myself and have unquestionably been there and done that, I understand. I understand what it's like to struggle to find work, I understand what it's like to endure low pay, and I understand what it's like to start over. I understand what it's like to move to find work, to learn not all is as advertised, to be exploited.

I'm also not afraid to walk away from a job because of maintenance, management, pay, conditions, politics, or any other reason that I deem appropriate. I never take a job that I'm not willing to walk away from at the drop at a hat, and I have.

I have never got a job in this business because of someone I know. Never because I had an "in" somewhere. Never because one was owed to me. Never because there was a path laid out to follow. Every job I've had in aviation, whether agricultural utility work or firefighting or airline or corporate or charter or ambulance, etc, has been because I didn't wait for the work to come to me. I beat the bushes, applied, and was hired. I've moved for work. Frequently worked extra, and other jobs. Whatever I needed to do. I didn't expect compassion or sympathy, and didn't rely on a perceived sense of entitlement.

Many years ago I was invited to a job interview for a large regional. In the interview I asked if it was correct that the company was charging new-hires for their training. I was told yes, but I had enough experience that the requirement didn't apply to me. I was asked if I had a problem with that. I said yes, walked out, and caught a flight home. Had I chosen to stay there, complete the interview and take the job, I'd have been ratifying the low pay and the buying of jobs.

Another employer once approached me with a theoretical. The company was looking at taking on first officers who paid their way and their training. They wanted to call it an "intern" program. I told the employer I'd walk in a heartbeat if I caught wind of such a scheme. then the employer asked if I'd be willing to pay for a GIII type rating, to get a quick upgrade to that airplane. I said no. He was willing more than triple my salary if I would do that, and I said no. Absolutely not. They didn't institute a pay to play program while I was there but I quit soon after, anyway. I don't support that sort of thing, not with my money, time, or my labor.

A student at a flight school is seldom guaranteed an instructor position. Whether a position exists or not really depends on the needs of the school, and whether the student is of a quality the school will hire really depends on the student. Whether the student becomes an instructor that gets students is dependent on multiple factors that range from the economic state to the location to the school to the drive of the future instructor. One this is certain; nobody owes him or her the job, and nobody owes him or her a single student.

It's time people stop wallowing in self pity and the mire of self entitlement. If you want to make your way in this world, and in this industry, it's up to YOU.

FlyJSH

You don't find those two ideas in conflict? Add to management fuel price volatility, scope erosion, adding five years to pilots' lifespans, bad people crashing planes into buildings, et cetera.


Flight schools that cater to students who are NOT seeking a career as a pilot make no claims; they just teach people to fly. Perfect! I built my hours at such a school: all of our students were foriegn and half of them would never fly again.

The "professional" flight schools make no promises, tis true. Nor do lottery operators make promises. They are both selling dreams, but at least the lottery folks post the odds. I tried to put some odds-ish numbers to show that an instructor building time by creating 5 more CFIs (who each themselves will create 5 more) is unwittingly reducing the value of his skill set. And by creating an exponentially larger labor pool, salaries will inevitably fall.

As with all things caveat emptor. Those who run "professional" flight schools are no worse than diet pill manufacturers, used car salesmen, healing-power-of-copper or any other snake oil promoter.

I just wouldn't let one of them date my sister.

JohnBurke

Conflict? None, whatsoever. Who has added to a pilot's lifespan? Are you referring to increases in the retirement age, allowing a pilot to work longer if he chooses, or is able?

Bad people crashing airplanes didn't take away from my employment. In fact, I became even more in demand. A third of the flight schools went out of business, however, and in the context of this thread, artificially inflated the number of students per remaining school.

Then you've no complaint and the ridiculous conspiracy theories and ratios bantied about in this thread are shown hollow.

You invented numbers and made a case that doesn't exist.

If one buys a lottery ticket, so be it. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

Flight instructing is not the lottery; it bears no similarity or relation to a lottery. It is not a game of chance. It is a job, and a segment of an industry, and delivers a service. Nobody is forced into a lottery or into flight instruction; it's choice, but whereas a lottery is a game of chance and a something-for-nothing proposition, flight instruction is not.

A fraction of those whom I have instructed have gone on to become instructors. Furthermore, I've instructed a lot of existing pilots, professionals, who have no desire to go find students. I've taught foreign students who were no competition, nor did they add to the faux "statistics" that you've conjured up. In fact, few of my students would have done so and such is the case at at many schools.

You seem to make the assumption that each student that is taught will become a flight instructor, which is a ridiculous assumption. Further, you intend to assume that each student from each of those former students will become an instructor who teaches only instructors? Quite a fantasy world, but no relationship with reality, of course.

If your sister is old enough to date, perhaps you should mind your own business.

FlyJSH

I am guessing since you joined APC two years ago, you missed the flight school heydays of the 90's. (By that I mean no disrespect, only that you may not know what was happening then.)

Over 400 training aircraft were based within 50 miles of Daytona Beach alone: Phoenix East had over 100 as did ERAU. Today Phoenix East has 35. ComAir, now Aerosim, in SFB had some 120; today only about 60.

American Flyers, Embry Riddle, Phoenix East, and ComAir each had over 100 instructors in Florida alone. Together they were churning over 1500 Comm AMELs (most of whom were CFIs) each year.

Back then, the vast majority of the instructors at the factory schools graduated from the same school. At ERAU and ComAir the percentage was well over 90%, and Phoenix East and American Flyers weren't far behind. So those schools alone employed 20-25% of their CFI graduates.

Have things changed since then? Definitely. The system back then was built like a house of cards. Has the flight instruction industry completely corrected itself? Is it stable now? Who knows.

JohnBurke

I was in aviation, and instructing well before that, son. You know what they say about assumptions, don't you?

Have it your way. The sky is falling. A great conspiracy is upon us. A grand master scheme is afoot. Most of all, every know-nothing no-time pilot wannabe is owed a living by the general public, the FAA, and the airlines, who should band together to subsidize and provide a guaranteed path to an airline career for anyone that wants one.

Stand clear until the sky has finished falling down. It could put an eye out.

FlyJSH

Son? Okay, Dad, please feel free to enlighten us. And I do know what they say about assumptions. I guess that makes us both one.

You have completely missed the point of what I was trying to say. I don't know if I failed to present my point well or if YOU Assumed.

I NEVER said anyone was owed anything. I never said ANYTHING about subsidies. The point I tried to make and apparently could not make simple enough for you to understand is that flight schools throw out a ton of fluff suggesting that they have the yellow brick road to the wondrous, fantastic jobs at companies like Pan Am, Midwest Express, Airborne Express, America West, Chicago Express, Braniff, DHL, Eastern, Emery, Evergreen, Mid-Continent, National, Ozark, TWA, and dozens of others. Maybe if the pilots at those airlines had tried a harder, they wouldn't have been thrown under a bus.

I am actually trying to impart some wisdom to the wet behind the ears folks that there IS NO magic ticket. Like used car salesmen, flight schools will tell prospects exactly what they want to hear. They are SALESMEN and are not obliged to tell the whole truth. I am trying to show every "know-nothing no-time pilot wannabe" (your words) that there are some unscrupulous people and that those "know-nothing no-time pilot wannabe(s)" need to be cautious.

But as you said, " If you want to make your way in this world, and in this industry, it's up to YOU." It doesn't matter if management is scum, regulations change (age 65), or traders mess with the markets (if you really think the price for WTI in 2008 should have been 140/barrel, I might as well be talking to stone wall), if a pilot really tries, he can make it.

I'll end with a couple quotes:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

— Warren Buffett, annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, February 2008.

As of 1992, in fact—though the picture would have improved since then—the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.

— Warren Buffett, billionaire investor, interview 1999.

AdiosMikeFox

There's a lot of truth to that article. A couple things thing it doesn't touch on are Luck and Timing. You'll never know until you leave the industry whether or not you've made the right choices.

As fickle as this industry is, you have to have made a lucky choice as your starting point. Aviation has terrible job security, think back to all the airlines that have disappeared since 9/11. Even top-tier regionals have failed or are failing. The timing of entry into the industry is luck of the draw, too. One has little choice as to their age and certificate completion time unless entering aviation later in life. Pilots hired in the early 90's had pretty good career progression compared to those hired late 90's or 2000-1. Even if the early 90's pilots didn't progress, they usually had a better chance of avoiding furlough.

When I was a flight student at a aviation college we had an evening where a a couple of guest speakers showed up at, IIRC, an alumni event. The first gentleman was your typical airline pilot, the one many of us hoped to become. Professional looking, wearing a decent suit, upright posture, greying hair, captain... Stereotypical. Had a few bumps in his career, but otherwise steady progress with a nice retirement in his future. He had all the usual things to say about the career, including the standard caveats. This is who we wanted to be. We'd fly for free to get this guy's career.

The second speaker. A little younger by about a decade. Maybe. A bit more disheveled, tired-looking. Not as professional. He had everything go wrong. Still stuck flying turboprops as a captain around halfway through his career. Divorced due to never being home and lousy pay. One carrier folded out from under him, another furloughed him. This was early 90's, so you can imagine the turboprop pay was pretty bad still. His speech was the exact opposite of Professional Captain's. Wished he'd considered something else. He'd paid a high price to chase the dream. To give him credit, he didn't try to dissuade us, he was there to provide a balance to the conversation and show that it doesn't always work out how you want.

JohnBurke

Entirely untrue. You'll know you've made the right choices when they bear fruit.

You'll never know, when you leave the industry, if you could have made it. You may even wind up a tired, self-sorry failure who returns here again and again to tell everyone else to get out.

Absolutely untrue, though those who think that luck is an important factor in their careers are likely to have an unsuccessful career. They are also unlikely to have success keeping their career on track when the peculiarities of the industry occur. "Luck" might be furloughs, bankruptcies, mergers, and so forth, but luck has nothing to do with how one handles them, or the decisions one makes while steering one's career forward.

Hopefully one doesn't drive a car by pulling out of the driveway and letting go of the wheel in the hopes that luck will get the car to the airport.

One shouldn't do the same with one's career. It's not luck, and it's not chance. I hear from too many who tell me that they've worked hard to find a position, and can't. They've applied to fifteen different companies in a month, after all. No luck.

Check back after the thousandth resume, contact, handshake, interview, doorknock, trip. Then we can talk about luck.

Therein lies the cancer of the industry. There's always some know-nothing idiot who wants to wet the bed and lower the bar for all, and some organizations in the industry know it. There's always someone willing to undercut, selfish in their aims to further their career, lazy, justifying anything to get ahead. They're usually the same who whine the loudest about luck, opportunity and wages when they've eventually moved on. Ironically, it's folks like them that lower wages and working conditions for all.

How much do you want to bet that the pilot who spoke to you didn't fly for free?

When I hear someone else blaming the world around them for their problems, it tells me a lot about that person. The job caused my divorce--really? Don't think you had anything to do with it? I'm stuck in a turboprop--tell me a lot about the attitude. Some people make a successful career in pistons, some in turboprops. Not good enough, huh? Can't progress--and this is the fault of the industry? Hardly.

Wanting isn't good enough. Wanting doesn't determine how one's career works out. Wanting is irrelevant. Wanting is on the same plane as luck.

If one leaves the driveway and wants the car to drive itself to the airport, one has about an even chance with allowing luck to take the car there. Generally, one needs to take charge and make it happen. There may be stop signs, detours, roadblocks, construction, traffic, crashes, weather, and a host of other challenges along the way; one can either plow headlong into them and depend on want to get through, or trust luck, or one can make the effort to know the conditions and handle them.

THAT is the difference in a successful career and one that is not.

A successful career does not mean one simply begins flying and ends up at the top of the ladder. A successful career means one presses on. Very few have just one or two jobs and are set for life, as they move through their career. Very few. Those who think anything else is failure are quite likely to be failures, and that becomes a reliance on luck.

Cubdriver

JB, your rugged individualism is compelling but when the house owns the odds nobody wins except the house. This thread is about whether or not the odds were fair in flight training historically speaking, in that what people believed or knew when they entered the business was met by what they were promised. We can discuss what an implied promise is, but I assume you agree anyone who dumped their life savings into flight training at some point thought it was a good risk at the time.

You can deliver your standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps motivational speech here until the cows go home, there is a place for that too, but the fact remains labor in America has always had to watch out for its rights and industry tends to exploit labor like it exploits everything else in the free world. Free market capitalism is a great thing in terms of personal motivation but it also tends to exploit everything in its path, including people who come looking for a job. Without regulation industry runs amok but with the right amount of regulation, it hums along nicely and creates a lot of jobs. There must be a balance between the employers and the employed for best results. When too many people are being suckered and suffer undue, needless hardship, then something is wrong.

JohnBurke

You talk as though I'm speaking to the wrong crowd, and that's not the case. I'm talking about flight instructing. Others have elected to diverge on tangents about the career and decry aviation as a whole, but the fact is when one undertakes flight training there are NO guarantees. One is expected to make one's way.

Those who feel entitled to a career path should join the military where it's given them, paid courtesy of someone else, and a ladder is provided for the career. No such fantasy exists in the civil world, where one is ABSOLUTELY expected to pull one's self up by one's own bootstraps.

I made my way the same as everyone else. The current crop of instructors or instructor-wannabe's always seems to think that they're special. They've got it hard. Nobody has seen it this tough. It's not like in your day, they say, when you had it easy. Today it's expensive. Today there are no students. Today this, today that, bull****.

It's aviation. There's no pipeline. There's no entitlement. Everyone who enters had better be prepared to work out their own path, and that includes very much at the entry level. Want someone to provide you with students? That's a sense of entitlement. Go get them. Bring them in. Make your own "luck."

There is no scheme. There is no pyramid scheme. There is no ponzi scheme. The statistics tossed around were false, imagined numbers, and they were wrong. If you happen to be training at a place where the competition is fierce and you don't feel there are enough students or enough work, then go somewhere else. Move. Find work elsewhere. Do something other than instruct, but make your way and don't whine about how entitled you think you are to a path and a career courtesy of someone else. The airlines don't owe you. The students don't owe you. The schools don't owe you. The taxpayer doesn't owe you. The FAA doesn't owe you.

Your career, your problem. No scheme. The schools provide the instructors and the airplanes or helicopters. You provide the cash. What do you get for your money? If you study and do your part, you get certification. After that, it's up to you. That's not a scheme. It's a school providing a service. If the school hires you, then great, you're someone they consider worth their money and time. If you get some students that walk in the door, great. If not, then it's up to you.

One can sit around and whine about fairness all day. Fairness is a myth. Life isn't fair. There's no such thing as "luck." When someone says "I wish," what they're really saying is "I'm too lazy to make it happen." Everything else is smoke and mirrors, usually inside one's own eyes; the mists of perception. For those who feel entitled, WAKE UP! This is aviation. The world isn't coming to you. Students aren't coming to you. Employers aren't coming to you.

You go to them. Make our way. If you want a conspiracy, if you want a scheme, that's it. That's the dirty secret, the meaning of life. If you want it done, right or wrong, do it yourself. When you undertake flight instructing or receiving instruction, that's what you can expect. If you're able to handle that, you'll do well. If you can't handle that, then the business may not be for you.

The industry has a way of weeding out those who aren't able to make it on their own. It's not about paying dues. It's about recognizing that one is responsible for one's own welfare, for making one's way and about not sitting back and waiting for someone else to do it all for you.

Nobody is "suckered" into this world of aviation. Even skyhigh with his tales of woe and misdirection wasn't mislead. He willingly walked into a career he knew nothing about, blind as a bat.

If I'm going to invest a few thousand in a car, I'll do a lot of research. If I'm going to invest in a tool, I don't buy the first one I see. I know what I'm buying. Same for a firearm, a vacation get away, or a coat. If I'm going to find a wife, I'm going to work very hard to get to know her, know what I'm getting into, and if I'm interested in a church, I'm going to check it out. Why in the hell would I consider a career without fully investigating it, prior to spending a dime? Suckered? No; those who claim such are simply lazy, and deserve no compassion.

Before one jumps off the high dive, check first to see if there's any water below.

It's only common sense.