Inside of Aerosim
12-20-2015, 08:20 PM
#1
New Hire
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Nov 2015
Posts: 4
Inside of Aerosim
Going to give any perspective instructors a taste of life at Aerosim. I instructed there for a year and a half and I will share you my experiences.
I'll start off with the good. There's plenty of work. Depending on how many aircraft you are "standardized" in at Aerosim you will be given the opportunity to get a lot of flight time fast. Keep in mind that a full work day will likely be pushing 16 hours. That being said, the pay is pretty good for pilot mill. Raises for every 500 hours dual given you have up to 1500 dual. I must say, the time and pay can rack up quickly, IF you are completely ready to dedicate your life to the place.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about some of the negatives.
As we talked about in the previous, if you want to be efficient there you have to dedicate your life there. A typical work week consisted of approximately 70-80 duty hours(Depending on if you worked 6 days a week) This gets physically exhausting real fast.
Another downside are the students. Some of my students I enjoyed flying with, but the majority of the students have no concept of you being a human being. They see you are done at 2100 and assume that you will devote the rest of your evening after a 14 hour day to them. Everything is a race for them. A race to the bottom if you will. If you end up teaching the contract students, many of them don't care for good training, they just care for training that will get them done so they can go back to China. They always use their friend as an example to justify this "But my friend is in ground school for the next course" or "my friend flew x hours today" which gets old real fast. They are very good with memorization but usually struggle with any correlation. So that means when they are done with ground school, they have the entire GLEIM prepware book memorized instead of knowing anything useful.
Another negative would be the base management. The place is run on a day to day basis. If they're offering a promotion position(Check instructor, MEI, etc) , they have already picked their roster before the sign up sheet comes out. So it doesn't matter if you're qualified or not. As long as you are buddy buddy with management you'll get the position. So when you work there you get to pick 1 of 2 options. Have the rest of your co-workers hate you cause you're a kiss up or enjoy working with your co-workers. The academy always lacked qualified instructors & aircraft when a majority of the student base was in a particular course. IE cessnas when most students were in private, cirruses/CFII's when most students were in instrument and MEI's/Seminoles when most of the students are in Commercial
Let's talk about the aircraft now. Aerosim has the highest time cirruses flying anywhere right now. In the last 6 months I was there, there were 3 major engine malfunctions in the cirrus. One incident totaled an aircraft, another killed a student and severely injured an instructor, and another leaving only a trail of oil from the runway to the taxiway. The quick turnovers and high temps are not what the cirruses were designed for. Not to mention the Cessnas most had 20,000+ hours on the air frame. Central Florida airspace is extremely congested with other training aircraft. Don't expect to see any traffic on your screen in the cirrus that Aerosim brags oh so much about. On another note, the planes are disgusting. The planes are not washed due to the loss of revenue it would be. The bellies are all permanently stained black and the composite feels like fine grade sandpaper. The stickers are falling off the aircraft.
Maintenance is there to help Aerosim make money. If the brake pads are worn beyond limits the question you get from them is usually "are you doing any stop and goes?" or if the tires are bare you get asked "how many landings are you doing?" Everything is always pushed until inspection. Most fixes are just band-aids until inspection. It's not uncommon to see a discrepancy book filled with the same issue and never being fixed.
There are many things to talk about but those are just some of the highlights.
Keep in mind that there are MANY CFI opportunities in Florida. If you decide to work at Aerosim as an instructor, my advice to you is keep your head down, get your time and get out.
I'll start off with the good. There's plenty of work. Depending on how many aircraft you are "standardized" in at Aerosim you will be given the opportunity to get a lot of flight time fast. Keep in mind that a full work day will likely be pushing 16 hours. That being said, the pay is pretty good for pilot mill. Raises for every 500 hours dual given you have up to 1500 dual. I must say, the time and pay can rack up quickly, IF you are completely ready to dedicate your life to the place.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about some of the negatives.
As we talked about in the previous, if you want to be efficient there you have to dedicate your life there. A typical work week consisted of approximately 70-80 duty hours(Depending on if you worked 6 days a week) This gets physically exhausting real fast.
Another downside are the students. Some of my students I enjoyed flying with, but the majority of the students have no concept of you being a human being. They see you are done at 2100 and assume that you will devote the rest of your evening after a 14 hour day to them. Everything is a race for them. A race to the bottom if you will. If you end up teaching the contract students, many of them don't care for good training, they just care for training that will get them done so they can go back to China. They always use their friend as an example to justify this "But my friend is in ground school for the next course" or "my friend flew x hours today" which gets old real fast. They are very good with memorization but usually struggle with any correlation. So that means when they are done with ground school, they have the entire GLEIM prepware book memorized instead of knowing anything useful.
Another negative would be the base management. The place is run on a day to day basis. If they're offering a promotion position(Check instructor, MEI, etc) , they have already picked their roster before the sign up sheet comes out. So it doesn't matter if you're qualified or not. As long as you are buddy buddy with management you'll get the position. So when you work there you get to pick 1 of 2 options. Have the rest of your co-workers hate you cause you're a kiss up or enjoy working with your co-workers. The academy always lacked qualified instructors & aircraft when a majority of the student base was in a particular course. IE cessnas when most students were in private, cirruses/CFII's when most students were in instrument and MEI's/Seminoles when most of the students are in Commercial
Let's talk about the aircraft now. Aerosim has the highest time cirruses flying anywhere right now. In the last 6 months I was there, there were 3 major engine malfunctions in the cirrus. One incident totaled an aircraft, another killed a student and severely injured an instructor, and another leaving only a trail of oil from the runway to the taxiway. The quick turnovers and high temps are not what the cirruses were designed for. Not to mention the Cessnas most had 20,000+ hours on the air frame. Central Florida airspace is extremely congested with other training aircraft. Don't expect to see any traffic on your screen in the cirrus that Aerosim brags oh so much about. On another note, the planes are disgusting. The planes are not washed due to the loss of revenue it would be. The bellies are all permanently stained black and the composite feels like fine grade sandpaper. The stickers are falling off the aircraft.
Maintenance is there to help Aerosim make money. If the brake pads are worn beyond limits the question you get from them is usually "are you doing any stop and goes?" or if the tires are bare you get asked "how many landings are you doing?" Everything is always pushed until inspection. Most fixes are just band-aids until inspection. It's not uncommon to see a discrepancy book filled with the same issue and never being fixed.
There are many things to talk about but those are just some of the highlights.
Keep in mind that there are MANY CFI opportunities in Florida. If you decide to work at Aerosim as an instructor, my advice to you is keep your head down, get your time and get out.
12-25-2015, 09:37 AM
#5
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Aug 2012
Position: 'Van Driver
Posts: 148
How do they handle student scheduling? Is is done by the instructor on his/her own time (i.e. not remunerated) or is it done by the admin staff? I know of a few big 141 foreign pilot mill schools that force instructors to do the scheduling for their students on their own time/dime and that gets really burdensome with a good student load in a 141-structured environment . . . in my opinion if a 141 school is getting good money from these foreign airlines then the least they can do is hire full-time staff to take care of the scheduling.
12-25-2015, 10:04 AM
#6
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Aug 2015
Position: Fetal
Posts: 226
Scheduling department does it for you. You put in a list of your students with what lesson they should be on and what time of day you want to fly with them or note if you need a certain part of the day free for something else. They take that list, laugh at it, make a few notes, toss it out and make a schedule for you. Many instructors forget to submit these schedule requests or are too incompetent to do them correctly anyway.
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