WITHOUT a doubt there are some fabulous fight instructors and schools in Canada.

Unfortunately there are some pretty shabby ones, too.

I have in the last couple of years flown with a lot of other instructors’ very well taught and skilled student pilots; but I’ve also flown with some other instructors’ very badly taught students who have paid for many tens of flight hours but have no appreciable skills to show for their time and money.

Regrettably, the people who have most need of the best, most experienced, most thoughtful instructors – novice students – are the ones who are easiest to fool with sub-standard teaching, because they have absolutely no way to recognize what they’re being sold.

The cause of the problem

Why does poor flight training persist? The problem is a structural one. Flight instructors are at the lowest rung of the piloting ladder; they don’t have enough experience to be insurable as the pilot of a larger more lucrative aircraft (insurance companies aren’t stupid) so they build their flying experience by teaching students like you.

It’s likely that today’s instructor was him/herself a student a few months ago – certainly less than a year. He or she may be able to fly tolerably well. But a new instructor has zero experience of helping someone else – you – to learn new skills. If you are the student of a new instructor (and with the expansion of the airlines at present, almost all instructors are new) then you are paying for them to experiment on you. The real student in the airplane isn’t you. The real student is the person whom you’re paying to teach you. How do you feel about that?

Furthermore, there is zero incentive for effective teaching. Flight schools charge by the hour: the longer your training takes, the more money they take from you. Young flight instructors are in it for the flight hours: the more hours their students fly with them, the sooner they can get that airline job. At the $20-30 per teaching hour they get paid by the flight school they certainly don’t want to work as an instructor for a day longer than they have to. And who can blame them?

We’re from the Government – we’re here to help

You might reasonably ask if it isn’t Government’s role to make sure flight training is effective. So let me tell you: Transport Canada’s mandate is essentially about flight safety. As long as student training is “safe”, it’s not the government’s place to intervene. When accidents happen Transport Canada will of course step in to see what went wrong. But until then, it’s left to the market to regulate itself. So you can be a “safe” student making their first solo flight with 40 hours of poor-to-mediocre training, or a safe student on their first solo with 10 hours of really good training; it’s left to you as the customer to seek out and buy whichever kind of training you want.

Other than that, Government monitors flight training quality by measuring flight test pass rates. If a school has a lot of failed flight tests it will get the wrong kind of attention; if it keeps its test pass rates high you it is judged to be doing a good job. Nobody looks at whether it took a school’s students an average of 50 hours or closer to 250 hours training to pass those tests: to Transport Canada, they are one and the same. To you, of course, the difference is close to $40,000 out of your pocket. Should you care which training you get? I would.

Warning signs

The difficulty for you, as a student pilot, is that in your present situation you have zero perspective: you have no way to judge the quality of what you’re buying. By the time you have a couple of thousand hours of flight time you’ll have (one hopes) worked out for yourself the bits of how to fly that you either learned wrong or never learned at all in primary training; by then you’ll be able to look back and make a realistic assessment of what you bought in those first fifty hours. If you’re willing: most people are understandably averse to reaching the conclusion that they overpaid for something.

But right now? No. So to help you out, I’ve jotted down a few notes. If your training environment shows any of the following characteristics, take it, at the minimum, as a warning sign. Maybe if you’re brave you can put some pressure on your flight school to improve things. And if that doesn’t work, remember you have the ultimate weapon at your disposal: you can use your feet and walk to somewhere else that treats you and your money with more respect.

So if you can avoid all of the following experiences, you’re probably in the right place for you: stick with it.

1. Do you have thirty, or forty hours of dual training, and your instructor hasn’t let you make a solo flight yet? If this is you, I don’t know what you think you’re paying for, but I can guarantee it’s not flight training.
2. Does your flight instructor know what syllabus he or she is supposed to be following? And do they actually follow it? (For the record, “one flight exercise per lesson” is not a training syllabus.) Here’s a challenge: ask your instructor to show you their written training programme. They should have a good idea of what they expect you to learn and achieve for each lesson, mapped out ahead of time. If they don’t know what you’re talking about, run away now.
3. Does your flight school make you fly a fixed number of hours of solo circuits? At best, this is lazy and thoughtless: a cookie-cutter approach to building skills. At worst, it’s a money grab. Hours of continuous circuits at one airport are as much fun and as much use as hours spent driving round and round the block. It’s boring and it’s a waste of time and fuel. And the noise irritates the neighbours.
4. Can your instructor explain in detail why he or she won’t let you take your flight test? Or is all they can say that you’re “nearly” ready – but you were just as “nearly” ready tens of hours and thousands of dollars ago, and you have no idea what they’re waiting for. Of course the truth is you may be ready or not ready, but it’s your instructor’s specific job to be able to tell you why they think you’re not ready, and to create a programme of training to get you ready.
5. Are you’re on your fourth instructor at this school? Have you found each time you think you’re getting somewhere, your instructor leaves for a “real” job and you’re back to doing another flight review “so we can see where you’re at”?
6. Have you had to fly some random number of check flights with your instructor’s supervisor so the school can make sure your instructor is doing their job right? Did you have to pay for those flights? Why should meeting your instructor’s supervision requirements come out of your pocket? If the supervisor isn’t completely happy with your progress, insist on no-charge remedial training to get you to the standard you should have reached if your instructor had taught you competently.
7. Does your flight school restrict anyone from flying in more than 5 knot crosswind? (Most training aircraft are capable of landing and taking off in a 20 knot crosswind; you should expect your instructor to be capable of the same, so they can teach you how to do it.)
8. Did your flight school quote you a training cost for a Private Pilot Licence based on the minimum requirements (45 hours flight time) but keep secret the fact that the national average is actually 71.8 hours, sixty percent higher, and sixty percent more expensive? And there’s even worse news: roughly half of all PPL students take longer than 71 hours to get their licence. Can your flight school list in detail everything they will do for you to make sure that you’re not in the slower-than-average half?
9. Did your instructor seem to lose interest in you when you start making solo flights? Why might that be? Because you no longer offer them anything they want: they’ve already got the sign-off from your first solo (first solo sign-offs are required to advance through the ranks of flight instructor), they don’t get credit for flight hours or get paid when you fly without them, and they know by the time you’re ready for a flight test (successful flight tests of an instructor’s students are also required for that instructor to advance) they’ll be working somewhere else. The sensible flight instructor will naturally lavish their attention on someone else who has more to offer than you do.
10. Have a look in your Pilot Training Record – the booklet in which your instructor records your training flights. Turn to the section at the back headed “instructor and student notes”. Is it blank, or has your instructor written appropriate, accurate notes about each flight and your progress? Better yet, does your instructor encourage you to write your own notes after each flight?
11. Do you find yourself excusing your excessive training times by saying “I’d rather learn slowly and get extra skills?” That would be great, if it were true. But unless your instructor told you were at flight test standard some time ago and you point-blank refused to take your flight test and insisted on more training, that isn’t what’s happening. In fact training is slow because your instruction is poor and basic skills are absent – not because instruction is good and skills are above and beyond.

Those are just a few things I can think of that should make you question what you’re paying for. You’re a student, but you’re also a customer. If you get the idea at the back of your mind that something isn’t going right, you should act on it. These things never get better on their own.

Can I help you?

To wrap up, you might be wondering if I’m suggesting I’m the right person to teach you better. The answer is, a very qualified “maybe”. If you’d like me to help I’m willing. But:

Firstly you have to be local to the Toronto area.

Secondly you have to be free for three hour lessons during Monday to Friday 9am-5pm (I’ve only a limited number of teaching slots available at the moment, and they’re all during weekdays.)

Thirdly you’ve got to be open to re-working your early hours of training. If you’re unhappy with your existing training (and if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be coming to me, would you?) it’s most likely because the early skills weren’t taught to you properly. So those 40 hours of training you’ve already paid for probably aren’t worth very much. If you’re open to that much bad news, and you’re willing to put the work in (I am) – then by all means get in touch. You know where to find me, and I look forward to hearing from you.