Greg Brown was flipping through a trade magazine when he noticed the photo
of a student from his days as a flight instructor in Lafayette, Indiana.
Her name was Ellen Dean. Brown remembers her as an unassuming university
student who rode her bicycle to the airport to take glider lessons from him.
"She was a shy young woman with no real background in flying," he says.
She is now one of the best aerobatics pilots in the world. And her status
as a three-time member of the U.S. national aerobatics team did not escape
the attention of the media.
"I opened up all the magazines, and there she was," says Brown. "That was
quite a thrill for an instructor. I taught her nothing about aerobatics, but
something I did must have worked there."
Brown is certainly one of the best flight instructors around. He grew up
around planes -- his dad was a pilot and owned light aircraft -- and he had
completed his first solo flight at the age of 19.
But he could not fulfill his ultimate professional goal of flying for a
commercial airline. He says that in the late 1970s, airlines had restrictive
hiring standards, and he did not meet them.
"They would not hire anyone who wore glasses, and they would not hire anybody
who was not a military-trained pilot," Brown says. So he became a flight instructor
instead.
What makes a savvy flight instructor? "One is a passion for teaching,"
says Brown. "Two is a passion for flying. And three is a great deal of patience
because [flying] is taught one-on-one."
Anton Tammpere showed a lot of patience during a training flight over the
coastal mountains of British Columbia. He told his student to fly from the
town of Abbotsford near Vancouver to Pemberton, a small town near the ski
resort of Whistler.
After he consulted the map, the student set a course through a steep valley.
There was only one problem. The valley was a dead end. Tammpere noticed the
mistake of his student right away. But instead of correcting his student immediately,
Tammpere decided to let him fly into the valley.
As the flight went on, the student became more confused because the map
did not match up with what he was seeing outside the cockpit. The student
eventually realized his mistake, and turned around well before it would have
been difficult to escape the tight confines of the valley.
It was a very real and dramatic experience for the student because he witnessed
the consequences of his mistake, Tammpere says.
"Now the student is thinking about the flight," he says. "You gotta make
the flight training as real as possible. You gotta give real scenarios, and
you gotta let the student make some mistakes.
"But on the other hand, as you let the students make mistakes, you gotta
know when it is enough because you can endanger the flight."
Nobody has been able to establish a direct link between a higher accident
rate and the quality of the instructors, Brown says.
"We agree that experience is a growing problem, and we are concerned about
any increase in accident rates," he says. "But we don't know if the lack of
experience is the cause of the increased accident rates."
But the accidents raise some serious questions. They point to a growing
problem many flight-training schools already face: a shortage of qualified
instructors. And this shortage may ripple right through the entire industry.
Commercial airlines are desperate to fill their cockpits, thanks to mandatory
requirements and a high demand for air travel. This scramble is good news
for pilots who want to move on. But it is not good news for flying schools
because many of their senior instructors cannot the resist the lure of getting
paid a lot of money to fly a large jet.
This means some of the remaining instructors are barely qualified to teach
others how to fly. And some of those people whom they teach will be future
flight instructors. So it is not impossible to foresee a future where a barely
qualified flight instructor is teaching another aspiring flight instructor.
"So you [have] got ducklings teaching ducklings how to fly," says Dorothy
Schick. She is a master flight instructor from Eugene, Oregon. "That's a serious
problem."
But it is also a great opportunity for people who want to stay in their
local area, be professional pilots and come home every night, Brown says.
Just ask Schick. A corporate salesperson for 18 years, Schick opened a
flight school following two deaths in the family. "I realized that you [have
got to] do what you love in life," she says. "And I love being with people,
which is why I was in sales. And I love flying."
Ironically, she has had less time to fly on her own since she became a
flight instructor. "The funny sort of thing is that you don't get to fly as
much for your own recreational purposes," she says. "But what I can
say is that I have learned a lot more. You learn a lot if you try to teach
somebody."
She has also met a lot of interesting people in her new career. "Once you
spend anywhere between 40 [and] 65 hours in an airplane with someone, you
develop a good relationship."
And it's hard to beat a sunny day up in the sky while the rest of us slave
away.
Ask Schick if she misses the drudgery and dullness of the office, and the
answer is a resounding no. "There is no comparison," she says. "I don't know
how to even compare it. I haven't once missed going into a cubicle."