AIN’s 2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) West brought together business aviation thought leaders to examine and discuss some of our industry’s pressing issues. The session’s topics included training challenges, legal aspects of business aviation, generational differences, employee retention, maintenance, hiring/DEI, compensation, and sustainability.
While every CALS Round Table attendee tends to be fervent about his or her experiences dealing with all the issues facing business aviation, the flight department leaders and flight training providers at the CALS West event were particularly enthusiastic.
The attendees identified four critical training areas that are having a significant impact on our industry, including the scheduling of training, supply-chain issues, increasing “enhanced” training options, and the effects of FAA regulations.
Training Today Starts 12 Months Out
Scheduling time in a simulator used to be easy; today, it’s anything but. The need to lock down slots up to a year in advance puts a strain on flight departments that need to ensure their crews are ready and able to fly.
One of the most significant issues is the typical training provider’s requirement that a particular pilot’s name be attached to a simulator reservation. That’s hard to do when pilot turnover is high and slots must be secured so many months before they’re needed.
“We may not have a pilot’s name, but we know we need a slot, and the training center won’t allow us to hold it,” a flight department manager said. “That puts enormous pressure on the flight departments and impacts the ability to keep the fleet flying.”
While it may not seem like much of an ask to require that a name be attached to a reservation, it can be impossible when that slot will be used to train a new hire.
“We need to schedule a slot while we are still in the hiring process of background checks, interviews, and the like,” a chief pilot explained. “And the training center now wants a non-refundable deposit on the slot.”
On the other side of the coin, a training center representative shared that it’s not uncommon for operators to practice “ghosting” when reserving slots. “They would secure multiple reservations and end up using only one or two, so they would just cancel the others at the last minute for convenience,” he said.
Of course, “ghosting” is just one factor impacting an operator’s and training provider’s ability to find and provide convenient scheduling.
What’s Behind the Scheduling Snafus
Today’s training center is as complex as any flight department, and it faces many similar challenges. One of the biggest is the increasingly common practice of a center’s customers poaching experienced instructor/pilots.
No doubt it’s an attractive solution. Instructors are exceptionally experienced, and poaching eliminates the need for initial training. In fact, one training provider’s representative said that the industry is losing about 20 percent of its instructors to flight departments.
And the need to hire and train replacements is putting additional strain on already saturated simulator slots. It takes time and money to train the trainers.
It’s an issue that’s not going unnoticed by flight departments. A director of a large department said that operators should refrain from that practice to help remedy the situation. “Maybe we should stop eating our own seed corn,” he commented.
Besides dealing with high instructor turnover, training providers are limited by the increased wear and tear on their simulators. SOGs (simulators on ground) are not uncommon.
“The simulator parts supply chain has been another issue causing scheduling backlogs,” a training provider manager said. “And the prices for parts have gone way up. Replacing a screen in a simulator used to cost $25,000, and now it’s up to $75,000—when you can get it.”
Is the FAA Getting in the Way?
If over-scheduling, understaffing, and ever-increasing spare parts prices were the only problems facing training providers, life would be a relative breeze. But, like everyone in aviation, providers and customers are faced with FAA oversight.
A training center evaluator shared that it can take up to a year to get a new-hire instructor up to qualified status now, and the FAA has “various reasons” for the long lead times. As you might assume, the CALS training attendees unanimously expressed dislike for this situation.
And speaking of training center evaluators, various training center representatives felt that the “FAA should ease up on that requirement in some situations.” For example, reevaluate the exact timing when the FAA “starts the clock” regarding a particular TCE candidate’s date of hire versus the instructor’s check ride date regarding logging the “experience” required to become a TCE.
Another idea shared by a flight department manager was that the FAA should no longer cap the number of check airmen working at a training center.
Of course, as you might expect, many of the corporate pilots and trainers in the room said that the “FAA may not be helping the industry.”
Training Doesn’t Stop at the Cockpit Door
Unfortunately, bad things do happen to good passengers and crews, and adding various types of “enhanced” training to their curriculums is proving to be yet another challenge for training providers.
By “enhanced” training, attendees were referring to upset recovery, emergency medical, dispatcher, communications, compliance, alertness management, international travel planning, and even Sarbanes Oxley-related programs.
Asked what they valued most, more than one flight department representative said his biggest concern was passenger health and dealing with emergencies like heart attacks and in-flight fires. Other major concerns voiced by CALS attendees included training the cabin crew on what to do during an in-flight emergency.
One solution intended to help lessen the backlog at the training providers that multiple attendees shared was to include their operation’s flight attendants as part of the crew’s regularly scheduled simulator training.
“That way, they can experience the pilots' workload during an emergency and give them a better perspective and deeper understanding,” a chief pilot explained.