To All Flight Instructors:
Because of instructor abuses regarding pre and post flight briefing charges,
effective immediately only 0.5 pre and 0.5 post flight briefing will be
allowed once per mission. This applies for all regular training missions
unless previously approved by the Director of Training, Chief Flight
Instructor or Program Manager.
-Director of Training
Because of instructor abuses regarding pre and post flight briefing charges,
effective immediately only 0.5 pre and 0.5 post flight briefing will be
allowed once per mission. This applies for all regular training missions
unless previously approved by the Director of Training, Chief Flight
Instructor or Program Manager.
-Director of Training
Remember the post about Pro Bono that I made last week? Well, here's a real world example from my own life. This company deleted our salaries and switched us to an hourly wage pay scale because they said that we werent working enough. Now that we are hourly, people have been working eighty to one hundred hour work weeks getting lots of overtime while complying with the boss's directive to get our hours up. Well, they're up. Now the managers upstairs are actually limiting our hours by not paying for the time that we are out preflighting with our students. I sent this reply- the names of the persons involved and of the flight school have been replaced.
[Sir],
I am confident that I can freely speak my mind about this new policy without the risk of retribution from my superiors.
I don't feel that I have abused the ground briefing times- to the contrary, I always put exactly the time that I was with my students from first sitting down with them until the prop starts turning. This time includes preflight briefing and the preflight itself (which includes waiting for fuel, dealing with maintenance delays, etc) I want it to be clear that all this time is spent doing something useful for the students. I always spend the down time waiting for the fuel truck or the A&Ps by teaching my students about non-instrument related little extras like wing washout, cowl flaps, dihedral, vortex generators, the discontinuous leading edge wings on the SR20, the different forms of landing gear struts... anything I can do to make that time valuable to their education. This time typically exceeds the .5 limitation placed by our management. Am I to believe my extra efforts to teach beyond the syllabus are worth nothing to my company?
As one having managerial experience, I could understand [the president's] decision to move to a wage system. A company cannot survive paying for work that goes undone. I'll admit that I was a little upset at first, but after that meeting last month I put myself in [the president's] shoes and I had to agree that the hourly system was a necessity. That being said, this decision to limit how much the company is willing to pay for the valuable ground training that I give my students strikes me as nothing less than atrocious (while in the interest of fairness, I must concur that a CFI who teaches his student nothing for an hour and bills for it is equally so) and the message that it sends to the rank and file CFI's like myself is that my efforts to prepare the student for the flight are of little worth to my superiors. When I was hired, I was told that we were expected to arrive no less than half an hour early for each flight to get the ground content done for that lesson. Every single day, my students and I arrive thirty minutes early to cover the ground lesson content in detail and to get the preflight weight and balance completed to that we can start the engine as closely as possible to the beginning of our block time. This time from first meeting the students for the ground portion to engine start is typically as long as 45 minutes to an hour and a half in some extreme cases where maintenance or aircraft tardiness are involved. Shall I arrive at work only fifteen minutes prior to the block time so that I do not exceed the .5 cap? Shall I only briefly skim over the items to be covered in the syllabus before each flight in lieu of teaching in detail from my Jeppesen manual? Shall I sit inside while my students perform the preflight instead of being with them like I have been? I find myself shifting priorities here- I was trying to comply with [the director of training's] directive to find ways to keep our billable hours up, but now I feel that I need to find ways to scale back the billable hours and stick to the bare minimums. I'm sure that you understand my confusion.
Another issue. How can we call ourselves a 24/7 operation if the students' ability to get to and from the airport is not likewise 24/7? Since the company schedules me to fly at 1am, I have had to pick my students up and drop them off at home again for their lessons. Since this takes my time and gas and their transportation to the airport is a critical business necessity for [the academy], I bill for it. I will no longer give my students rides neither to nor from the airport unless I am free to bill each student in my car for this time.
May I propose an alternative. Instead of limiting our hours, let's start holding CFI's accountable for the work that they bill for. Include a portion in the small invoice sheets at dispatch for the CFI to write down the ground lesson content that he administered during the hour and a half that he is billing for. Let's teach the students to take responsibility for their training and to only sign off on material that was actually covered during their ground lesson.
My students have given me great feedback on my ground lessons and I assure you that I am wasting no one's time or money.
Respectfully,
[JB]
I am confident that I can freely speak my mind about this new policy without the risk of retribution from my superiors.
I don't feel that I have abused the ground briefing times- to the contrary, I always put exactly the time that I was with my students from first sitting down with them until the prop starts turning. This time includes preflight briefing and the preflight itself (which includes waiting for fuel, dealing with maintenance delays, etc) I want it to be clear that all this time is spent doing something useful for the students. I always spend the down time waiting for the fuel truck or the A&Ps by teaching my students about non-instrument related little extras like wing washout, cowl flaps, dihedral, vortex generators, the discontinuous leading edge wings on the SR20, the different forms of landing gear struts... anything I can do to make that time valuable to their education. This time typically exceeds the .5 limitation placed by our management. Am I to believe my extra efforts to teach beyond the syllabus are worth nothing to my company?
As one having managerial experience, I could understand [the president's] decision to move to a wage system. A company cannot survive paying for work that goes undone. I'll admit that I was a little upset at first, but after that meeting last month I put myself in [the president's] shoes and I had to agree that the hourly system was a necessity. That being said, this decision to limit how much the company is willing to pay for the valuable ground training that I give my students strikes me as nothing less than atrocious (while in the interest of fairness, I must concur that a CFI who teaches his student nothing for an hour and bills for it is equally so) and the message that it sends to the rank and file CFI's like myself is that my efforts to prepare the student for the flight are of little worth to my superiors. When I was hired, I was told that we were expected to arrive no less than half an hour early for each flight to get the ground content done for that lesson. Every single day, my students and I arrive thirty minutes early to cover the ground lesson content in detail and to get the preflight weight and balance completed to that we can start the engine as closely as possible to the beginning of our block time. This time from first meeting the students for the ground portion to engine start is typically as long as 45 minutes to an hour and a half in some extreme cases where maintenance or aircraft tardiness are involved. Shall I arrive at work only fifteen minutes prior to the block time so that I do not exceed the .5 cap? Shall I only briefly skim over the items to be covered in the syllabus before each flight in lieu of teaching in detail from my Jeppesen manual? Shall I sit inside while my students perform the preflight instead of being with them like I have been? I find myself shifting priorities here- I was trying to comply with [the director of training's] directive to find ways to keep our billable hours up, but now I feel that I need to find ways to scale back the billable hours and stick to the bare minimums. I'm sure that you understand my confusion.
Another issue. How can we call ourselves a 24/7 operation if the students' ability to get to and from the airport is not likewise 24/7? Since the company schedules me to fly at 1am, I have had to pick my students up and drop them off at home again for their lessons. Since this takes my time and gas and their transportation to the airport is a critical business necessity for [the academy], I bill for it. I will no longer give my students rides neither to nor from the airport unless I am free to bill each student in my car for this time.
May I propose an alternative. Instead of limiting our hours, let's start holding CFI's accountable for the work that they bill for. Include a portion in the small invoice sheets at dispatch for the CFI to write down the ground lesson content that he administered during the hour and a half that he is billing for. Let's teach the students to take responsibility for their training and to only sign off on material that was actually covered during their ground lesson.
My students have given me great feedback on my ground lessons and I assure you that I am wasting no one's time or money.
Respectfully,
[JB]
The flight academy where I work has a bus transit system to transport students from home, to the airport, then back again during normal business hours. However, since the company took over our schedules last month, we have been getting slated to fly at all hours of the night. Nobody on top put any thought into extending the bus system's hours of operation to cover the new need for 24/7 transportation. It is not uncommon for a CFI to begin at 10pm and end at 6am one day, then begin at 6am and end at 2:30pm the next day. That's not so much of a problem- what is is the transportation of the students who depend on the school's shuttle to get them to the airport. Since they have no ride in the middle of the night, the CFIs have had to pick them up from home and drop them back off again, which we always billed for... until now. The company forbade us to bill for that time. So naturally, most of the CFIs at work are leaving their students stranded at the airport until the morning shuttle picks them up some hours later.
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