That's how it's done now in the AF. In fact, there's a lot of silver bars teaching butter bars. I don't see too many training deaths, or any flying related deaths for that matter. That system in particular seems to be working fine.
Was talking about WWII, not today. Today those silver bars are professional trainers and they are training in an an initio format from start to finish and condensing it massively so it sticks. There’s also a washout rate in the military and not quite so much on the civilian side. Comparing military training TODAY to WWII where we killed a huge number of students, isn’t what I was talking about at all.
If anything, the civilian side could learn from what the military CHANGED from WWII to now. Getting someone ramped up to fly military jets in the speed and relative safety at very young ages with scientifically proven poorer judgement and brain development, is a very impressive feat of the military programs today.
You really seem to be hung up on wages. I don't know how wages equates to quality. Are you saying only the best pilots are the ones making lots of money?
Not at all. What I’ve been saying is that in all other businesses we hire professional trainers. At much higher wages. The typical CFI is eating ramen on typical CFI wages. Mostly because at least some significant portion of the CFI pool doesn’t see it as a viable career. It’s just time building to move on from. Yes there are CFIs who take it more seriously, no question, but there’s a lot who don’t.
In other businesses we wouldn’t even hire that guy or gal to teach. Because teaching in other businesses is a career job, paid well, and often filled by very experienced people.
The problem in the civilian fly for fun side of things is economics. Nobody will pay what a trainer makes in other businesses in aviation.
I don’t know how to fix it, but it’s broken. For sure. Time building shouldn’t be a goal of an instructor. It should be a good enough job you can make a career of it. It’s really not.
There are no one-year pilots training anybody at any Part 121 airline.
Not talking about 121. Taking about lower rungs. Primary training. Where all the worst possible habits and misconceptions can get stuck in a head for life. One years teaching absolute noobs. Some are good at it. Others aren’t.
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Cool description of your carrier’s training stuff. Thanks. Definitely not what he’s seeing. And yeah, he’s not the sort who says he won’t learn. If anything the conversation got started because after the business entity change, he says he went from learning on each sim trip, to wondering why they weren’t teaching anything new anymore. They also switched to a crap ton of “read this PDF on a laptop” type stuff that isn’t training; just reading, and he was lamenting this change over dinner and a beer one evening.
Again, you seem very fixated on incomes, but "...double what any 121 pays at first..."? We have first year guys making $100,000. You can't get a PC help desk guy for less than $200,000?
This was about airline jobs in general. Not 121. We hire way above regional starting pay. But we also have to pay close to your 121 starting pay to retain staff. If a specialty area of IT like security or such, halfway $150,000 to someone with only three to five years of experience out of school is commonplace.
It seems like your industry is part of the current generation's frustration of "Five years experience required" for all jobs, even entry level. How is one supposed to get five years experience when all jobs require five years of experience?
Not at all. All we ask is someone knows the tech they put on a resume fairly cold unless they state otherwise. The big difference here is that airplanes are airplanes and they fly the same every year. Tech, especially programming languages, change on a whim nearly every two to three years as to what’s popular, but the ability to learn new languages and understand they’re all built on the same underlying concepts is hard for some and easy for others.
An example might be someone goes to school and the school is using say, Java for all levels of programming classes. So some “get it” during school that Java is operating on underlying principals. Variables, loops, logic controls, etc. And some come out thinking they learned one language and that’s all they’ll need. It’s about (sadly) a 50/50 split because schools don’t flunk many people in these courses. The school wants the money and will happily tell the people they’ll be making bank in IT soon.
@murphey can tell horror stories. She’s been teaching IT recently. It’s bad how many schools take advantage of the folks who don’t quite “get it”. Computers really only do a very limited number of things at the hardware level and the language used to make them do that, really doesn’t matter much. Learning one is as difficult as it gets, but then you’ll need to study and use ten more. The concepts learned under the first one will apply. Only a few really operate significantly differently than the other languages.
At least at the airlines there is a pretty clear path (actually several clear paths) to go from student pilot to airline pilot if someone desires. All with checks and gates and training and mentoring along the way. I actually think the system works pretty well. Do some slip through the cracks? Sure. But based on some of the "tech support" I've gotten in the past, that seem to happen in your industry as well.
The output is decent. It could be better. But that would require the low level teaching to be a real career and not a starve to death step.
I'm not worried. I'm sure you did a fine job, and anything they need to know that you didn't teach them will be taught to them by other instructors more knowledgeable in the areas you were lacking in. That's how it's supposed to work.
Doctors, nurses, attorneys, plumbers, aircraft mechanics... I think most professions like this have some sort of apprenticeship program. I don't think a new medical school graduate comes right out and is able to remove a spleen without any instruction or supervision.
Oh I know. Whatever is missed gets fixed later. Just seems like we could fix it further up front. You really have to love it to do primary work. Many do, but not all.
Ok. How would you fix it?
There isn’t one really. Economically zero to 1500 hours is a no man’s land. It got way better when airlines found there weren’t enough people in the pipeline.
All I’m saying is we have to treat our folks way better than the pre-121 years treat pilots. They show up wanting the beginning of a career and if they get stuck at the low end, a wage that matches the level of time, effort, and money they put in already.
We can’t tell people “Work for the equivalent for all the hours you’re putting in for low wages for a number of years, and hope to move up...” they’ll walk across the street and be hired at a wage that’ll get them well set up for a long time so they can learn and grow.
For reference, even in these “my CFI left for the airlines before I could finish my Private, I’ve been through three now” the economics of insurance and such are that the largest club in the area is paying $21 a flight hour. I believe ground is unpaid or lower than that. That’s $43K if you can fly 40 hours a week no ground. In a city with median houses selling for just under half a million bucks. That’s so low it isn’t even in the ballpark of a professional level job wage here.
You don’t even want to know how many alerts are called each month for aircraft off the runway where the occupants are a student and CFI. It’s appalling. I’ve honestly got no idea why instructors are that bad at teaching go arounds or simple aircraft control on the roll out, but I have my theories. One is VERY inexperienced instructors.
Hell, I’m one. I will admit that readily. But I sought out old instructors with lots of time teaching and paid MUCH more per hour than the local clubs to work with them. But that’s the exception and not the rule in low end training.
We see it here online all the time. “What’s the cheapest way to a pilot’s license?” What we don’t say, but is the truth, is “Find a time builder and train to only minimum standards in a shoddy maintained aircraft, and don’t ask if you’re covered on any insurance. You’re not.”
Someone really wants cheap, there it is. Always available at the low end. Always. Especially for those not planning to go pro. The low end of training in this biz is way too low. But it’s the price the market will bear.
$40K a year in any other business for a pro instructor of a skillet that could kill you? Absolutely laughable. Nobody would do it.
Aviation? Happening during the best hiring I’ve seen in a lifetime.
