Fly Kalamazoo

Whats wrong with instruction today and why?

Most Pilot training is conducted by fairly new Flight Instructors. This is because the Pilot job market was booming through the 90’s. Even after 9/11/01 there was a great need for regional flying as legacy airlines needed to quickly reduce capacity and cost to stay profitable. Many instructors choose these readily available airline jobs rather than stay around flight schools to pass on the knowledge and experience they had gained teaching.  As a result, there is a generation gap in instructors whereby flight instructors are increasingly taught by lower and lower quality instructors who are just building up time to go to the airlines.

Instructors move on too quickly. Especially the good ones. The good instructors attract the most students and get the hours logged the fastest. In the rush of all this upward movement, there are fewer and fewer instructors who strive to improve the instructional experience. Out of this number there are even fewer who will go to the chief pilot and say “I have a better way”.  Many chief pilots and flight school managers ignore the “better way” and are reluctant to accept change or re-write training programs. Sometimes this reluctance is born from liability concerns or comes from training manuals handed down by aircraft manufacturers and their legal teams. And what do they know about training pilots?

How and why we do it better.

Here at RG Aviation we have very high time instructors who have chosen flight training as a profession. We have instructors that have thousands of hours of teaching experience.

In addition our instructors have commercial airline flying or corporate flying experience. They are not shying away from the more challenging commercial flying; rather they are people that have purposefully chosen to be a Flight Instructor after or instead of a career of simply flying an aircraft from A to B. They prefer teaching flying to just flying.

When you do a job over and over again you tend to get really good at it. You learn what works and what does not. What to to do, when, and why. To that end we have authored our own training program which incorporates years of refinement. Its not only what we teach, but how we approach the learning process.

The way we teach is very different from what is available from other leading learning institutions such as Jeppesen, Sportys, and other major providers of training programs. We reviewed at them all. None of them do what we do. We found the canned programs to be lacking.

So what is so different about our style?

For one we don’t cover 5 to 10 learning goals per flight. Instead we do just one. We repeat this until the student has mastered it to the required level of proficiency of a private pilot. We completely master one goal moving on to something new. This has the added benefit of giving the student confidence. 

Next, we took the learning blocks and reordered them from the easiest to the most difficult. Sounds simple, right? Well if you take a look at other publications you will see that it is the opposite that dominates the market for training materials.

Financial Motive?

When we look at the success we have with students we are pleased with the results. We have to wonder if there is a financial motive for other schools to keep using these complicated and convoluted training programs. Since we all charge by the hour for all services, there is a disincentive to change to a program that can gets students through in a shorter time.

Our syllabus

To purchase our syllabus call 269-350-4234