FSANA International Flight School Operator Conference attendees were treated to a lunch address from Bruce Landsberg on Friday, March 3, during FSANA’s annual conference. Landsberg, Vice Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) since 2018 discussed how critical good flight training is to the overall safety of our national airspace system and the safety of pilots and passengers. The base levels of training and the skills that are developed from the initial training efforts affect a pilot’s ability and mindset for the rest of their career.

Landsberg has served on many government committees promoting aviation safety, including assignments as industry co-chair for runway safety, the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee, and NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, and was executive director of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Air Safety Foundation and then president of the AOPA Foundation and Air Safety Institute from 1992 until retiring in 2014. During his AOPA tenure, he conducted countless safety seminars, speeches, and podcasts and wrote a monthly column on aviation safety for its magazine, AOPA Pilot.

The final day of the 2023 FSANA conference brought up additional topics and covered data that is not discussed in any other sectors in aviation.

A key discussion took place regarding the supply chain infrastructure for flight training providers to keep their operations going. Shortages of consumable parts such as tires and oil filters as two simple examples remain in short and delayed supply. While there were some reports that the length of wait time for some of these is improving slightly from what was reported last year, there remain challenges with ordering new production aircraft as most manufacturers have close to or beyond 2-year wait lists to order aircraft. It also remains hard in an active purchaser market for training providers to go out to the used market and purchase legacy aircraft that can be used or refurbished to use in their training operations. The ability to keep aircraft flying in the flight training environment is of critical concern to be able to continue providing training.

Breakout sessions highlighted the use of simulators and even discussions of the potential use of virtual reality for flight training operations, what types of new revenue centers flight training providers might be able to develop, and best practices and new tips in marketing efforts for flight training providers. All of these again offered an opportunity for attendees and presenters to share information back and forth that might help improve the overall industry.

The last session of the conference specifically related to the discussion of student and equipment financing in the flight training sector. We all know that flight training is expensive for customers and it is expensive for the providers to conduct with the high-cost infrastructure requirements present. Current challenges that were identified related to increasing costs of training for customers and how this is causing many to max out their loans that were approved for training. As they do this, and as interest rates rise, it is affecting whether they can continue training, if they have to find alternative sources of funds, or if they can, the overall monthly payment they need to make when their loans are increased. This also increases the length of time a student may need to pay back loans they take out due to increase loan total amounts. These are challenges that the industry is continuing to work to mitigate and provide new solutions regarding how to continue to make the ability to secure training.

This year's conference was the largest, being the 14th annual conference. The conference continues to grow and this year was no different. With a full exhibitor roster and more attendees than ever before, FSANA has already decided that next year it will need to host the event at a larger facility to continue growing. That growth would not be present without the engagement of all of those that have attended this year and in past years. With each year the conference expands, so does the utility of the conference for all who participate. Each year more resources come together.

FSANA looks forward to next year's event which will again take place in Las Vegas, NV. Watch our communications soon for a save-the-date announcement for the 15th annual International Flight School Operators Conference.

"The flight training industry is booming," noted Bob Rockmaker, FSANA President. "All reports we get from members and the flight training community are that they are operating at or close to maximum training capacity."

This sounds good initially, but there are challenges that come with this also.

The flight training community is using all of its resources to meet pilot training demand for hiring in professional pilot employment operations. Expansion of the production of pilots may not be presently possible considering the infrastructure resources that are present and available for the flight training community. That is a challenge that leaves our industry unable to expand what we are able to produce for the economic needs of our national airspace system.

"I believe we are in the perfect storm in aviation at the moment. The aviation industry is one large system broken into a variety of sub-component systems and some of those systems are poised to critically fail," said Rockmaker. "I don't say this lightly, and I don't say it to sound alarmist, but nothing can keep running at full speed forever, including our industry."

Safety Goal is Zero GA Accidents

As we think about our flight training industry, and flying in general, our goal needs to be zero accidents. This approach to safety was included in the presentation at this year's conference by Everrette Rochon from the FAA as well. No one goes out on any flights and thinks, "today I am willing to accept an accident or an incident because the last 9 or 10 flights I haven't crashed," right? Our goal should always be zero accidents and especially fatalities. This is an approach we need to have in our flight training community. Just because it is hard or perhaps statistically improbable to achieve shouldn't mean we should be willing to accept some levels of accidents as normal and unavoidable. In NTSB Vice Chairman Landsberg's presentation, he highlighted that the difference between an accident and a crash is that an accident was something that was unexpected and a crash was something foreseeable that should have been avoidable. Our aviation operations tend to keep making the same mistakes and crashing the same way. We need to keep learning from these and reduce the numbers of crashes. Avoidable risks need to mitigated to avoid their repeating to enhance safety.

A goal of FSANA going forward is to keep working with all stakeholders to make sure that we keep our flight training business sector robust, able to continue to provide services, growing to meet demand, and most importantly safe. There are a lot of components to doing this and as the pressure on the training industry mounts, we need to keep those pressures from jeopardizing any progress that has been made thus far or that is poised to be made going forward.

A regular session as a part of the yearly conference, attendees had an afternoon session talking about airline hiring trends, airline staffing trends, how airlines recruit pilots, and what best career advice flight training providers might be able to provide to their students and instructors who are seeking to transition into future professional pilot jobs.

An interesting slide highlighted what it means for an airline to consider an applicant competitive. Some key traits that were noted that set a candidate apart included having an up-to-date application packet, showing progressive leadership experience, a commitment to safety being demonstrated, good quality letters of recommendation, community engagement, and continual professional development. Even when considering major airline hiring, PIC turbine experience is no longer a requirement, it is highly valued, but a good demonstration of dedication as a professional pilot can even outweigh just having those turbine hours experiences.

There is no doubt that the relationship between the flight training community and the entities that hire professional pilots is critical to our national aviation infrastructure. Discussions like this help foster the relationship, help flight training providers properly develop their students and staff to move on, and help airlines share information with this community to best prepare their future employees.

The pass rates on practical tests for initial issuance certificates, specifically the private pilot, the commercial pilot, and the flight instructor certificates went down in 2022 for the first time in the past few years. And it went down on all three certificates.

Many in the training industry have felt over the past few months that the passing rate was declining, and now that we have the 2022 US Civil Airman Statistics, we can put data to that feeling. While these rates didn’t drop to the lower points we saw a few years ago, that turn was a turn in the wrong direction.

None of the pass rate decreases were overly large, but there is concern that this turn may really only be a measure of what happened in part of the year. In the early parts of 2022 the most active airline hiring had not fully ramped up yet. As the year went on, a significant percentage of the acting CFI population in the United States was hired by airlines seeking to fill new-hire classes for airline employment. As this happened, the core of CFIs in our system turned over from those with more experience to those who were largely new at the job.

There is concern that this lesser experienced group of instructors may be a corollary, if not causal, at least in part with the reductions in pass rates that have been reported by many DPEs and now are being seen in the certification pass rates data from 2022. While we can only speculate at the moment, this will be very worth tracking into the 2023 certification practices. I might add, if we think this is happening, we have the opportunity to head off any further degradation in pilot training processes that result in lower pass rates by being proactive in the upcoming year. Hopefully, we can do this and stop any further reduction in pass rates for pilot certification activities. Let’s not let this be the canary in the coal mine that we ignore.

ATP Certificates are required to fly for many airline and cargo carrier operations, so the number of these that are completed in our system each year is n important metric related to if we can meet hiring demands. The total ATP issuance numbers for 2022 are a marked increase from some of the previous years.

This is the result of a push that was made by many ATP-CTP providers and airlines as they worked hard to staff up for pilot shortages. It also makes up for a little backlog of people who got qualified during COVID-affected years but didn’t complete certification.

The table here and the chart below as a yearly number show the total ATP certificates issued, inclusive of multi- and single-engine ATP certificates. From the data I have, it appears that the multi-engine ATP certificates represent approximately 98% of the ATP certificates issued.

While I see the 2022 number as encouraging, I also think it is slightly anomalous in terms of what our industry can supply on an ongoing basis. The unique condition of more qualified individuals (those who had accomplished the requisite experience times) and the push, heavily by regional airlines, by those providing training for ATP candidates, gave us a huge number of ATP certification events in 2022 compared to many previous years.

We are already hearing of airlines canceling or delaying new hire classes due to an inability to support the large numbers of training largely due to a lack of instructor staff to do so. This shortage is likely to temper the ability to train higher, or potentially even equivalent, numbers of ATPs in subsequent years unless there are changes in the actual training process.

What does that mean?

Well, in my humble opinion, we will continue training and certifying as many ATPs as our system can support in the upcoming years. But, I think this will be a lower number than the 2022 year saw, yet higher than many of the historical years over the past couple of decades. We will likely be somewhere in the middle.