Another AOPA failure, IMO

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MountainDude

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MountainDude
From what I read, there is a shortage of DPEs and their fees for PPL are $900-1500.
This is reason #47 why it's so hard to become a pilot, and another failure of AOPA, IMO. They spend $50M every year to tell us how they are "working on helping us". If they wanted to, they would have fixed this problem years ago.
I so wish there was an organization that actually works, not talks, to enable more people to become and remain pilots.

How can we encourage/stimulate/badger AOPA into doing things and accomplishing goals, instead of just spending $50M per year on entertainment?
 
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I don’t disagree with both your frustration with AOPA and the price of DPE exams.

As an observation, the DPE price is set by supply and demand - capitalism. The “fix”, which I personally think would be reasonable, would be to limit the amount they could charge by regulation - something some may choose to label as “socialism”.

Yeah, another “fix” is to increase the supply of DPEs to the point where the demand decreases and so does the cost. That’s fine too - so long as we don’t dumb down the DPE pool too, too much. Then again, “price fixing” within the group would still be a possibility.

Strictly an observation.

As for AOPA, I’m letting my membership lapse.
 


Well, if it is $1000 a test, maybe do two a day, can work 7 days, but call it five, reads like a $260,000 job. Go ahead and apply or encourage others to try.

www.aopa.org

Checkride: Becoming a DPE

For most of us, our first contact with a designated pilot examiner (DPE) is during our private pilot checkride, while we are often too busy to notice the role an examiner plays in the process. But over the years, I’ve observed that most of my examiners have made their job seem easy and fun.
www.aopa.org
 
Ever seen the process to become a DPE? THAT is why there aren’t more.

Ever wonder why there aren’t more places to take written? Just ANOTHER example of the faa falling flat in their faces….

There is kind of a pattern here.
 
Tools said:
Ever seen the process to become a DPE? THAT is why there aren’t more.

Ever wonder why there aren’t more places to take written? Just ANOTHER example of the faa falling flat in their faces….

There is kind of a pattern here.
Click to expand...

So you have looked into the process? go for it
 
4RNB said:


Well, if it is $1000 a test, maybe do two a day, can work 7 days, but call it five, reads like a $260,000 job. Go ahead and apply or encourage others to try.

www.aopa.org

Checkride: Becoming a DPE

For most of us, our first contact with a designated pilot examiner (DPE) is during our private pilot checkride, while we are often too busy to notice the role an examiner plays in the process. But over the years, I’ve observed that most of my examiners have made their job seem easy and fun.
www.aopa.org
Click to expand...
Seems like a heck of a retirement job. Do a 2-3 a week and make $100-150K/yr.
 
Wow my ppl exam cost me 250 Canadian.

But you know everything in aviation is expensive.
 
4RNB said:
So you have looked into the process? go for it
Click to expand...

I’ve looked into BOTH of those processes…

PSI has a monopoly on testing sites. They said, nah, not enough need in your area. Keep in mind I had a 141 flight school AND a A&P test prep school, AND a 145 repair facility, AND was a PSI test site already, just not a PSI FAA test site.

So I looked into becoming an ODA so I could designate my own site… The FAA told me, nah, I know that’s the FARs, but we won’t do that.

I applied to be a DPE about 4 years ago… no word. I even got a 141 school certified in the mean time.

The depths of the FAAs ineptitude is remarkable! Impressive in a weird way.
 
In the supply/demand situation the demand is relatively constant. The FAA has the biggest impact on supply with its oversight on DPE certification and performance. I know of at least three DPEs who lost their privileges. All were excellent and highly experienced pilots who seemed to me to be very thorough in the exam process.

My initial commercial glider instructor check ride (1970s) was done by the FAA and was a joke compared to what is required of a DPE today. The examiner didn't even ride with me in the two seat glider. He just watched me do a few flights from the ground (and ironically asked me to take his 12 year old son for a ride as my first passenger as a CFI, which I did). A DPE doing that today might even be putting his commercial certificate at risk, not to mention his DPE privileges.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I don't see how a person could reasonably draw AOPA into this conversation.
Next, they're going to blamed for the weather.
We get it, you don't like the organization.
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AOPA's stated mission is to enable more people to become and remain pilots. They collect $50M in fees every year to accomplish that mission. I am seeing many addressable factors that are endangering the pilot community and do not see AOPA doing/accomplishing anything. All they do is write feel-good articles.

If AOPA actually want to accomplish their stated mission, they would follow the focus, efficiency, and productivity of some start-ups:
- identify the factors that are preventing people from becoming and remaining pilots. This can easily be done by surveys of wanna-be-pilots and the current ones.
- rank order those factors from biggest to smallest
- hire the people/teams to address the top ones
- make reasonable expectations about the timing of the accomplishments and milestones
- hold the people accountable for the accomplishments/milestones (otherwise they have to go)
- SUPER IMPORTANT: be transparent about all these activities on the website, so that people contributing $50M per year know exactly what are the prioritized issues and what is the progress towards resolving them.
This "recipe" is so easy, millions of people know how to do it. Yet, AOPA hires a CEO who doesn't, and pay him $1.5M per year.

Really shameful that we are not actually represented against the wave of anti-aviation efforts. I would be happy to pay a membership fee to an organization that actually does something, but I don't see one.
 
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In the last 3 years I’ve taken 2 checkrides with Feds and had 3 inspections with Feds.

I’ve taken 5 check events with designees.

I know 3 people who have become designees and one who lost his DPE. 3 who have become FSDO designated check airmen.

I applied for a APOI position.

Things you may not know:
1. There’s a GOOD reason we have the people in there that we do.

2. The easiest checkrides in the ENTIRE industry are ATP level AND 121.

3. There is ZERO effort afoot to fix any of these problems.

4. There are VERY creative solutions behind the scenes…

I agree AOPA is simply lacking leadership. That’s a membership problem. Vote with your wallet…

Properly led, they COULD make more change, they have proved it. It takes a VERY accomplished leader of volunteers to make it work.

Frankly, I find this board well managed. As usual, I find myself in the company of people WAAAY smarter than myself. Seems if the leader of AOPA even lurked, he’d have the tools to do better.
 
We’re a strange tribe, Americans. No more expensive FAA DPEs on the federal tit. We insist that private sector is better than government at doing everything and then complain when government functions are private sectorized and it cost a fortune because of artificial scarcity to keep the prices up. I remember the arguments, we’ll have more and better and cheaper DPEs under the private sector. Writtens will be more accessible and cheaper when the private sector does it.

So we privatized both. We pilots insisted & congress listened, potential contractors lobbied hard.

FAAs got nothing to do with scarcity or costs anymore. The market drives the process. When we complained about the price of written, the FAA, at the insistence of the congressional committee, capped the price. The private sector contractor then shrank the number of sites offering them to make the same amount of money each year.

I really don’t understand the shortage of DPEs either, but I do know they’d be considerably more plentiful if they were professional slots within the FAA. At least with the FAA, they would take young pilots and develop them as employees as a life-long career path and and DPE would not be some guy’s retirement project.
________________

After 28 yrs in the Navy, don’t get me started about DoD being captured clients of the Defense Contractors. The entire game for them was not to deliver on the goods, but to increase the size of their contract and to become “rent seekers” (getting a yearly stipend for almost no work) for as many proprietary systems as possible.

Case in point: a davit system on one of the new LCS’ (little crappy ships, we called them) was proprietary and required the Dutch company that suppled them to fly over to the west coast to repair…replacing 2 fuses. That is multi-year, multi-million dollar a year contract.There were dozens and dozens of such systems in the LCS fleet.

The entire LCS program is a $100 billion dollar ”private sector from the ground up” failure from the Rumsfeld era. Every standard navy protocol for designing, building, testing & acceptance of ships was bypassed, for ships that we don’t want, & don’t work.

Sorry. End of Rant. AR SK.
 
rhkennerly said:
We’re a strange tribe, Americans. No more expensive FAA DPEs on the federal tit. We insist that private sector is better than government at doing everything and then complain when government functions are private sectorized and it cost a fortune because of artificial scarcity to keep the prices up. I remember the arguments, we’ll have more and better and cheaper DPEs under the private sector. Writtens will be more accessible and cheaper when the private sector does it.

So we privatized both. We pilots insisted & congress listened, potential contractors lobbied hard.

FAAs got nothing to do with scarcity or costs anymore. The market drives the process. When we complained about the price of written, the FAA, at the insistence of the congressional committee, capped the price. The private sector contractor then shrank the number of sites offering them to make the same amount of money each year.

I really don’t understand the shortage of DPEs either, but I do know they’d be considerably more plentiful if they were professional slots within the FAA. At least with the FAA, they would take young pilots and develop them as employees as a life-long career path and and DPE would not be some guy’s retirement project.
________________

After 28 yrs in the Navy, don’t get me started about DoD being captured clients of the Defense Contractors. The entire game for them was not to deliver on the goods, but to increase the size of their contract and to become “rent seekers” (getting a yearly stipend for almost no work) for as many proprietary systems as possible.

Case in point: a davit system on one of the new LCS’ (little crappy ships, we called them) was proprietary and required the Dutch company that suppled them to fly over to the west coast to repair…replacing 2 fuses. That is multi-year, multi-million dollar a year contract.There were dozens and dozens of such systems in the LCS fleet.

The entire LCS program is a $100 billion dollar ”private sector from the ground up” failure from the Rumsfeld era. Every standard navy protocol for designing, building, testing & acceptance of ships was bypassed, for ships that we don’t want, & don’t work.

Sorry. End of Rant. AR SK.
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Thank you for bringing up these complex issues. An average aviator would not be able to understand them or know what to do about them. But a $50M yearly organization, whose mission is to help us, should know this landscape and work towards improving it for our benefit. I hear that NRA fights hard for their members' rights. I have not seen anything like that from AOPA since Basicmed.
 
William Pete Hodges said:
You would think if there is a shortage of DPEs, and they can justify higher fees because of it, then there would be more people becoming DPEs as a result. So why is that not happening?
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It's always been artificially constrained by the FAA. THe FAA *WILL* not issue a designation to any qualified person who asks. The assignment of designations is arbitrary and capricious (as is the removal of such designations).
 
I don' think the price is that high in today's world. At all. As an engineer If I had to go out to a jobsite that wasn't in our contract, the typically fee would have been $1500 to $2000. That was 8 years ago.

I guess, depending on where you live, $900 to $1500 for a private pilot checkride may sound like a lot.

In my world, it sounds reasonable for a very knowledgeable professional who is going to spend this better part of his day testing and flying around in an aircraft with a learner who doesn't have their pilots license yet.
 
1. IF selected, getting it is ONEROUS.
2. IF designated, keeping is ONEROUS.
3. Losing is EASY….

This changes the metric of those applying… refer to #2. And down we go.
 
Lndwarrior said:
I don' think the price is that high in today's world. At all. As an engineer If I had to go out to a jobsite that wasn't in our contract, the typically fee would have been $1500 to $2000. That was 8 years ago.

I guess, depending on where you live, $900 to $1500 for a private pilot checkride may sound like a lot.

In my world, it sounds reasonable for a very knowledgeable professional who is going to spend this better part of his day testing and flying around in an aircraft with a learner who doesn't have their pilots license yet.
Click to expand...

You can justify almost any price using some kind of a comp. That is not the point here.
My point is, why has AOPA not worked hard to bring more DPEs to market, which would
1. likely reduce the exam costs and
2. certainly reduce the wait times, which can be as much as 2 months
 
Tools said:
1. IF selected, getting it is ONEROUS.
2. IF designated, keeping is ONEROUS.
3. Losing is EASY….

This changes the metric of those applying… refer to #2. And down we go.
Click to expand...
There is nothing to indicate that the FAA tightens issuance of DPE’s independent of public, NTSB, and congressional pressure To “do something.” If the perpetrator is already dead and, having exacted his own punishment by his own hand, the question frequently focuses on “who passed this fool?” (The DPE). And “who licensed both those idiots?” (The FAA).

the people the FAA works for (us) insist every time a twin engined jet smashes onto a busy interstate; a ****ty bonanza can’t make the turn back & crashes into a residential neighborhood, killing a mother & a child in a van; pick any number of Ring doorbell vids of aircraft landing in residential areas. i’m thinking of that Mooney with the “unbreakable wing spar” plunging straight down out of the sky into a citizen‘s front yard with its two wingtips clasped together above the cabin, like praying hands.

small airports aren’t closing because of noise. That’s just the excuse. Those airports are in the sights of homeowners because they watch YOUTUBE as well. and they are afraid. those Airports are under pressure because our fellow citizens are afraid of us, afraid their house will be the next airplane induced blaze featured on the tube, the next family smacked into oblivion On a freeway.

the other taxpayers fear our bad habits, our poor judgment, our training, & our certification process.

The Congress & The FAA are merely responding to pressure.
 
rhkennerly said:
We’re a strange tribe, Americans. No more expensive FAA DPEs on the federal tit. We insist that private sector is better than government at doing everything and then complain when government functions are private sectorized and it cost a fortune because of artificial scarcity to keep the prices up. I remember the arguments, we’ll have more and better and cheaper DPEs under the private sector. Writtens will be more accessible and cheaper when the private sector does it.

So we privatized both. We pilots insisted & congress listened, potential contractors lobbied hard.

FAAs got nothing to do with scarcity or costs anymore. The market drives the process. When we complained about the price of written, the FAA, at the insistence of the congressional committee, capped the price. The private sector contractor then shrank the number of sites offering them to make the same amount of money each year.

I really don’t understand the shortage of DPEs either, but I do know they’d be considerably more plentiful if they were professional slots within the FAA. At least with the FAA, they would take young pilots and develop them as employees as a life-long career path and and DPE would not be some guy’s retirement project.
________________

After 28 yrs in the Navy, don’t get me started about DoD being captured clients of the Defense Contractors. The entire game for them was not to deliver on the goods, but to increase the size of their contract and to become “rent seekers” (getting a yearly stipend for almost no work) for as many proprietary systems as possible.

Case in point: a davit system on one of the new LCS’ (little crappy ships, we called them) was proprietary and required the Dutch company that suppled them to fly over to the west coast to repair…replacing 2 fuses. That is multi-year, multi-million dollar a year contract.There were dozens and dozens of such systems in the LCS fleet.

The entire LCS program is a $100 billion dollar ”private sector from the ground up” failure from the Rumsfeld era. Every standard navy protocol for designing, building, testing & acceptance of ships was bypassed, for ships that we don’t want, & don’t work.

Sorry. End of Rant. AR SK.
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I've been on both sides of the aisle. The government sets requirements and contractors respond. The government is 100% in control of the procurement process.

The reality is that, for all the bellyaching, the system works. US combat equipment is the best in the world. For every lemon like LCS, there are success stories like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It's reputation was so bad that Hollywood made a comedy movie about it. Now the Ukrainians can't get enough of them, because they have proven far superior to Russian equipment in direct combat.

Closer to the subject matter of PoA, how about the F16? Has there been a more successful fighter platform in history than the F16, still in production after 50 years?

Back to the FAA. If the FAA agrees to privatize the DPE function, then hamstrings the effort by constraining the supply of private DPEs, that is not an indictment of privatization. It is yet another example of bureaucracies doing what they do.
 
flyingron said:
It's always been artificially constrained by the FAA. THe FAA *WILL* not issue a designation to any qualified person who asks. The assignment of designations is arbitrary and capricious (as is the removal of such designations).
Click to expand...

The real problem is FAA funding and allocation of funds. DPE's, like all other designees require oversight. When the powers that be limit the hiring and retention of FAA personnel, then the job of oversight is constrained.

Not everyone who applies for a DPE position is qualified. The FAA made a severe mistake in allowing any A&P who can pass a multiple choice written exam to become IA, which flooded the market and opened the door to some of these IA's to start selling signatures, which is now reflected in a large part of the GA fleet being in decrepit condition. Open up the DPE ranks the same way, and you will see guys willing to issue certificates for a couple of hundred bucks and a twenty minute "check ride".

In reality, the FAA DPE system is one of the best when compared against other countries aviation authorities. Flooding the system with anyone who wants to do the task will not improve it and only open it up for abuse.
 
MountainDude said:
…My point is, why has AOPA not worked hard to bring more DPEs to market, which would
1. likely reduce the exam costs and
2. certainly reduce the wait times, which can be as much as 2 months
Click to expand...

Because the educational financial lenders are happy, a career seeking student gets any loan they want, the big schools charge what they want, and airlines are not asking for “fast”. Your and my hobby arses don’t really move the needle.

@rhkennerly impressive rant about DoD contractors, love it
 
Bob Noel said:
Too bad congress and the faa don’t have the spine to stand up to hysterical ignorant morons
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Are they? I mean Ignorant or hysterical? Or are they merely human capable of projecting the dangers from what they see in the present? That is what amygdala is for. And, we often loose sight of this, they are also fellow taxpayers & property owners, exercising their Constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

in America, property rights always trump regulatory privileges.

GA represents a small part of the NAS the FAA is responsible for, but cost a disproportionate of their resources. Yet all we do is bad-mouth them. Yet regular taxpayers support the entire NAS, including GA.

there are other solutions, each less appealing than the next. Europe comes to mind. Taxpayers revolted & put GA out on its own, “a use tax” levied for landings, tower contacts, & god knows what else. “I don’t use that. Make those little airplanes & their arrogant pilots self-supporting.”

don’t say it can’t happen here. Self-supporting Use taxes are the darling of particular US parties: national parks, USPS, public transportation, garbage & recycling in some places, private fire & police departments, and airport authorities, to name but a few.

AOPA advertises that they are protecting ”you right to fly.” I’ve checked. That is among the many regulatory right citizens have negotiated in the last 250 yrs. It’s not in the constitution. Wr’d better get smarter about regulating ourselves.
 
Ed Haywood said:
I've been on both sides of the aisle. The government sets requirements and contractors respond. The government is 100% in control of the procurement process.
Click to expand...

but the key is the contract, where the Govt get’s outfoxed by a stable of high power layers every time. Not to mention the constant appeals of unfavorable findings. Then the govt has a choice, grinfpd that process to a halt or eat the loss.

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Move on” our troubadour sang.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Back to the FAA. If the FAA agrees to privatize the DPE function, then hamstrings the effort by constraining the supply of private DPEs, that is not an indictment of privatization. It is yet another example of bureaucracies doing what they do.
Click to expand...

depending on how you squint at this, as opposed to in-house employees doing DPE, the FAA has already privatized most of the process. Now certifying DPEs is just another bureaucratic paperwork process with a very high risk & no reward.
 
rhkennerly said:
We’re a strange tribe, Americans. No more expensive FAA DPEs on the federal tit. We insist that private sector is better than government at doing everything and then complain when government functions are private sectorized and it cost a fortune because of artificial scarcity to keep the prices up. I remember the arguments, we’ll have more and better and cheaper DPEs under the private sector. Writtens will be more accessible and cheaper when the private sector does it.

So we privatized both. We pilots insisted & congress listened, potential contractors lobbied hard.

FAAs got nothing to do with scarcity or costs anymore. The market drives the process. When we complained about the price of written, the FAA, at the insistence of the congressional committee, capped the price. The private sector contractor then shrank the number of sites offering them to make the same amount of money each year.

I really don’t understand the shortage of DPEs either, but I do know they’d be considerably more plentiful if they were professional slots within the FAA. At least with the FAA, they would take young pilots and develop them as employees as a life-long career path and and DPE would not be some guy’s retirement project.
________________

After 28 yrs in the Navy, don’t get me started about DoD being captured clients of the Defense Contractors. The entire game for them was not to deliver on the goods, but to increase the size of their contract and to become “rent seekers” (getting a yearly stipend for almost no work) for as many proprietary systems as possible.

Case in point: a davit system on one of the new LCS’ (little crappy ships, we called them) was proprietary and required the Dutch company that suppled them to fly over to the west coast to repair…replacing 2 fuses. That is multi-year, multi-million dollar a year contract.There were dozens and dozens of such systems in the LCS fleet.

The entire LCS program is a $100 billion dollar ”private sector from the ground up” failure from the Rumsfeld era. Every standard navy protocol for designing, building, testing & acceptance of ships was bypassed, for ships that we don’t want, & don’t work.

Sorry. End of Rant. AR SK.
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There is no guarantee that the private sector will be an effective provider of services if there is no competition.
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Because the educational financial lenders are happy, a career seeking student gets any loan they want, the big schools charge what they want, and airlines are not asking for “fast”. Your and my hobby arses don’t really move the needle.

@rhkennerly impressive rant about DoD contractors, love it
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Rainy day here. But people don’t realize how pervasive this process is. I throw up in the back of my throat every time Lockheed or GD ads show up in front of a show featuring a woman, a white man, & a brown person in uniform showing them operating sophisticated shipboard equipment under a blue & red lit in the CnC, with an overlay of the American flag fluttering in the breeze. “serving those who serve.”

It all eyewash. nobody with a contract gives a **** about the troops.
 
Tools said:
Frankly, I find this board well managed. As usual, I find myself in the company of people WAAAY smarter than myself. Seems if the leader of AOPA even lurked, he’d have the tools to do better.
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The closure of the AOPA Forum may be an indication of how much they care about the opinions of the little people.
 
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Palmpilot said:
The closure of the AOPA Forum maybe an indication of how much they care about the opinions of the little people.
Click to expand...
Imagine it had more to do with people who have an unrepresentative axe to grind flooding the forum. As well as bad information being passed.

the AOPA foruns are quite responsive to critics.
 
rhkennerly said:
but the key is the contract, where the Govt get’s outfoxed by a stable of high power layers every time. ...
Click to expand...

"every time"?

I trust you are using hyperbole.
 
Post 34 already stole my thunder but I'll double down anyways:


I've buried friends before the age of 30 because of capitalization delays by rapacious defense contracts. I lost one marriage and a second one almost didn't happen, to congressional pork barreled basing decisions that support both rent-seeking contractors and the local economic districts they capture. The latter is done in order to spread the footprint wide enough to so that no single congress person can put an end to the cash-n-grab nonsense. All at zero primary consideration nor positive impact to combat readiness.

My current wife hates what I do precisely because my life is pawned at the feet of some pay-to-play contractor's whims to decide whether and at what pace to overhaul engines and hydraulic control servos that should have been at the National Mall's Air and Space Museum 40 years ago. And that behemoth that starts with a B and cannot stay off the media headlines for one second, is already 5 years late to delivering a basic trainer replacement the Koreans have been flying a better version of full up COTS for decades now. I'm not even going to debate the details of some of y'alls revisionist history about the Viper program, honestly this isn't the venue. I'll be sure and tell the widow of my former student that defense contractors say all is well in the home front with legacy fighter program procurement/sustainment. Doesn't escape me they didn't bring up Fat Amy instead. I swear, if I had a quarter for every time that business casual CorpO lanyard around neck cohort come to tell me what was good for me, I'd be independent-wealth retired by now.
 
How can we encourage/stimulate/badger AOPA into doing things and accomplishing goals, instead of just spending $50M per year on entertainment?
 
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