I'm pretty sure it will be foreigners. But there is a supply of trust fund babies in this country that will surely jump on this band wagon; eyes wide shut.

Foreign governments who need pilots. The pilot will be an indentured servant for 10+ years. Win-Win! What does concern me is if Boeing, Jeppesen, (John and Martha King!), et al. get on the bandwagon and push for MPL in the US. They have a lot of weight. Also, I can foresee some sort of govt grant or loan scheme administered by Boeing. As Air Force orders drop for their planes, they need to find some way to get the govt. milk.

Probably, a number of training events come free with aircraft purchase.

In other countries is this the only way one can get into an airliner? By getting a MPL license?

I think it has pretty much become the std. 250 hour commercial license followed by sim time and a lot of ground school. Other countries don't have extensive GA and 135 operations (we don't have them anymore either!), so this is what ICAO have come up. AirBus also was way ahead of this by designing airplanes made to be flown by low time pilots.

Interesting. Boeing wants other countries to issue ATP certificates with less hours than the US issues commercial certificates.

oh yeah ok. 20k for the type. but i gurantee you there is more than that being put into you from sim time paying the check airman to do the ioe. its not a clean cut figure that its just 20k. probably not 100k either. the short answer is it aint cheap

Flying Daddy's airplane is very cost effective.


well aware of that fact. at least all the money i make as a pilot will be all profit instead of paying off debt. ^^

:DIn other countries where MPL is employed, it is the exception, not the rule. The MPL pilot's skill level is supposedly on par with a CPL license holder who also did a type rating on FAR/CS25 aircraft, but a lot less time in airplanes and much more time in simulators. MPL holders cannot exercise single engine or multi engine privileges (outside of their type rating). MPL holders are restricted to flying aircraft for one certificate holder and can't switch companies until they have gained an ATPL. Lufthansa found this to be a limitation since they operate multiple certificates and had no flexibility to put their MPL pilots in other certificates and reverted back to the CPL path.

What do you mean?

While its true that airliners come with some training events by the manufacturer, that would have zero bearing on entry level student pilots. New planes under warranty don't create a supply of new mechanics either.

Extensive?
 

The 135 market is the USA is not as extensive as many poeple seem to think. GA is used for training, and don't expect people to be able to gain their 1500 through either of these routes any more.

MPL programs typically still require time in GA aircraft, just less of it and more focus on sims and situational training that pilots would not get in a GA environment. Complexity being 1 important aspect.

You want part 135 opportunities? Seek them out in Alaska. I just got hired by a VFR part 135 operator, flying 207s. I thought that I would be stuck with instructing all the way up to 1500 hours. Heck, my company is known for hiring guys with wet commercial hours without prior Alaska time and putting them in a multi-turbine airplane until they reach the needed time for VFR PIC. This place is a safe haven for part 135s.

Overlooked
 

That is a place where 135 is still strong, Alaska. Some, including myself overlooked it.

Not for lacking of trying. I have a friend that owns a flight school in Dallas and has been trying to get a 135 going for four years. Keeps getting stonewalled by the FAA. Recently got a letter that said (paraphrased) "we don't have the resources to address your application so it's indefinitely on hold."

I contacted an FAA friend in another district that put me in touch with their 135 point of contact. That person advised that the only way to get a 135 going these days was to rent a PO BOX and a pseudo office in a low volume district (i.e. North Dakota) and try and push it through there. Several people I know have the equipment and finances to go through the process but are being unduly burdened from a regulatory standpoint.

I hear the best way to do it is to buy an existing Part 135 company.

That's tricky too, because technically you can't "buy" a 135 certificate and put your name on it. The certificate is issued to one person. That said, the FAA does have a "transfer" process, but you still need to get everything changed over in the manuals and documents, which will be looked at due to the required name change. If something is wrong and was not caught earlier, the process could be long and hard.

But what you are missing here is the way we all used to build time, rather than pay the "big bucks" to get hired at 300 hours are slowly drying up. The environment is very different from 10 or even 5 years ago. Mom and pop flight schools are shutting down all over the place due to lack of students and the increased cost of flying in general. These guys now are paying what it cost me for an instructor and the airplane for a mid 70s 172 DRY. Plus all the check operations have dried up. The few opportunities that are left are being targeted by regional airlines to create a pipeline for these college grads to build time for the restricted ATP. Plus some of the flight requirements for the ATP have increased as well. Building the 1500 hours was the easy part, but getting all the instrument, night, and XC could be difficult for a CFI.

Not saying I advocate going head over heels into debt for this job (I didn't). But going "the hard way" has gotten a hell of a lot harder due to the new ATP rule and the decreasing opportunities for time building jobs.

The accident rate for corporate aviation is higher than for 121 operations

Yes and when the computers stop working on that airbus (AirFrance 447) the low-time ab-initio relief pilot at the controls who did not possess basic stall recovery skills-likely because he was hired with very low flight time-kills all 228 people on board.

What did you pay back then? At my school we have wet rates for C172s starting at $100 an hour. According to the government inflation calculator, $23 in 1975 = $100 in 2014.

CPI Inflation Calculator

Something has to give at that price IMO. Does it have a mogas STC? Hows the maint and A/C condition? What's the rental place's record for events?

The 300 hour wonder pilot is and always has been a giant myth. Yes it happened, but very, very rarely in numbers or time periods. UAL went crazy doing that for different reasons for a short while, and some regionals did it too for a very limited time. The vast majority of regionals always required "12 and 2" or greater, if not by policy then certainly to be competitive, even when smaller legacy airlines were hiring more per year than they are now. Even when regionals were wasting pilot talent flying pax around 19-30 at a time. Saying the regional industry needs 300 hour wonder pukes to staff flights is a cosmic joke. They don't and they never did, even during the record hiring of the late 90's.

As for time building, the system over all isn't just going to need wet commercial tickets (even if we did eliminate the new mins) but also mass quantities of new instructors. There isn't much pipeline productivity to gain by trying to shave off a few hundred hours when any instructor that wants to can get 80+ hours a month anyway. Yet the same A4A types that squeal about higher mins aren't doing jack squat to address the true bottom end which is new pilot and new instructor supply.

The slight amount of spool up we're seeing on that end is almost exclusively coming from fantasy camp business models thinking everyone needs to pay 6 figures for ratings and everything has to be done in brand new quarter million dollar overpriced G1000 suite aircraft. That is rediculous. If a legacy is truly worried about staffing its feeders, they need to ramp up (or just buy and expand) a 141/61 flight school, fill it with cheap used high time 2-4 seat round dial planes and sell ratings for cost. Problem solved. But these days anything "education" is raging on government steroids. If a major in French ceramics cost 6 figures, I guess an aviation degree and a couple ratings has to be more, right? :rolleyes:

Also, why aren't they lobbying for another general aviation revitalization act? The trial lawyer lobby hated the last one, and their spin machine is back up again, calling for the skies to be raining down with our precious children if the noble defenders of justice can't shotgun sue anyone and anything for every accident but the last act was a HUGE success. Its time for another one.

No engine STC, 100LL. We are the biggest rental/training fleet in at least a 700 miles radius and expanding. It is a club with over 700 members. I know that the plane has a small profit margin. We have 8 aircraft at that price. We own two separate maintenance shops. Maintenance and AC condition are excellent, but it is a 1970's vintage aircraft. Our aircraft price ranges from $99 to $240 an hour wet.

I paid $75 an hour for the 172 with an instructor wet ten years ago. $50 an hour solo.

With inflation that comes to $95 an hour for the plane and instruction. So your quoted rate for an airplane wet is $5 more than I paid for an airplane and an instructor.

The 61 mom and pop schools have been going out of business for years - I owned mine in PHN (Port Huron MI) in the late 90's. We were a lasergrade testing center - That was taken away by the FAA because we didn't do the requisite mimimum number per year (what does it matter? WE bought the equipment.) It sure helped though when my four aircraft fleet flew 10 hours in February.

We sold charts - the FAA took that away from us becuase we didn't sell the requisite minimum. That helped too.

Insurance on a 1981 Cessna 172 went from $2500 per year to 10K per year for training and rental (we never made a claim or ever missed a payment). Of course I could have had $10,000 deductibles and sued the students but I didn't.

The opinions here about low student starts are spot on. Eventually when the ATP pipeline dries up that will be the problem. Then there's the "if they paid more, ATPs would materialize" theory. But those guys (much like myself) are getting older and more cynical. How many would REALLY come back?

In a nutshell, what do you see as the solution(s)? Serious question. And yes, I know an FBO that fell below FAA minimums and got all those things you mentioned yanked. :mad:

Good post.

You mean like the Comair Aviati... er, um, Delta Connection Acca... I mean, the Aerosim Flight Academy?


I attended the school formerly known as the Comair Aviation Accademy in 1996. I don't remember the exact cost to get Comm ASEL, AMEL, CFI, CFII, and MEI, but it was low to mid $30's ($34k seems to ring a bell). According to the Aerosim website, the cost for those ratings is about $51,500. Using the same calculator, $33,900 in 1996 is $51,500.

Or, to put it another way...

1996 minimum wage was $4.75. It took 7157 hours to earn $33,900. Today, minimum wage is $7.25. Today it takes 7103 hours to earn $51,500.

Eitherway, it is a wash. Expensive then, expensive now.

The solution is to kiss Bedford's ass or Parker's ass :D or whoever's ass until the whole diseased regional system comes crashing down.

There is no spoon.

Until then, Bless God.

Exactly. Yet another brilliant "buy high sell low" asset flip by the no talent Mullin/Reid pump and dump machine.

I've got a student who almost went to ATP. He keeps getting emails from them advertising their program and said that the latest email said their cost has increased by $5000. $65,000 and goes up to $70,000 after September 1st.

The cheapest answer for everyone is to allow flight training for profit in an experimental aircraft with a MOgas approval. The reality is MOgas is a much more quality controlled than in the 60's and the Rotax engines are just a safe or safer as an O-200. Flight training would fall to the cost of ITT, ITI tech curriculum and not one minute of insructional value lost.

. Have you guys seen this? http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PvEfDmldrIM. Seems like a good idea, but a person or school is still getting a used 152 for almost 100k. I wonder if these "new" 152s will qualify for the mogas STC. I am with you on the mogas issue. That would save so much money. It is a shame getting more headway on mogas wasn't done in the past. I also like the Rotax engines, but their throttle response is insane!! I'm OK with the Rotax as long as a friction lock is included to physically slow down the throttle input. As far as sport planes themselves.... has anyone flown in one much less given instruction to primary students in them? Good lord!! No bueno!! I'll take a Cessna or Piper any day--these are MUCH more forgiving airplanes.

With all that said I'm surprised the regionals haven't bought a few Cessna 150s with the auto fuel STC. They could use them to help pilots finish off their hours, and probably even double them up by doing safety pilot flying. Pay a flight school to supervise the program.

I've done quite a bit of instructing in LSAs. I think they are a great training platform. Yes, much more responsive, but isn't that a good thing? The student is able to see right away the result of their control inputs. I would even venture to say learning in a more responsive airplane makes for a better learning experience.

Heck, motorgliders...

More people
 

More souls on board a 737 though. More litigious families. It's all about the insurance companies these days which is why u need 1200 hrs to fly a caravan cargo master 135 with no pax!

Not intending to be rude and start fights, but to me its like teaching people drive in a Ford Focus or in a sports car. I'll take the the Ford any day and twice on Sunday.

"Of course, increasing special light-sport activity has also brought increasing numbers of LSA accidents. What might not have been anticipated is how quickly they’ve increased. There have been 133 in the five years since 2006, when significant numbers of LSAs first began to appear in the accident record. Although the numbers remain too small to bear a great deal of weight, the trend is not entirely encouraging. The 35 that occurred in 2009 made up a little more than 3 percent of that year’s accidents in single-engine piston airplanes, and more than 4 percent of those in fixed-gear piston singles. The estimated accident rate for LSAs in 2009 was likewise about triple that for piston singles in general. The rate estimate is fairly soft; however, the discrepancy is still wide enough to warrant some attention from the airplanes’ operators—not to mention students and instructors."

Also,

"Sport pilot instructors must have 5 hours of PIC in each make and model set before they can teach in that aircraft."

For these supposedly simple airplane that are meant for 20 hour wonders, that rule sounds a lot like this,

"(f) Training received in a multiengine airplane, a helicopter, or a powered-lift. A flight instructor may not give training required for the issuance of a certificate or rating in a multiengine airplane, a helicopter, or a powered-lift unless that flight instructor has at least 5 flight hours of pilot-in-command time in the specific make and model of multiengine airplane, helicopter, or powered-lift, as appropriate."

So now light sports are on the order of multis, helicopters, and powered lift. Yikes. So much for simpler, easier flying. :eek:

Yes, absolutely gliders!

How would u feel if u were 65? LOL!!
 

Pretty sure I'll be chomping at the bit to get in a BBJ or Falcon by age 65.

Bigger isn't always better.