One Thousand, One Hundred, Ten and One. Organically growing a flight training practice.

When I was a teenager my father would always be hounding me about going to work. He grew up in South Boston during the great depression; quitting high school to drive a truck with a forged Teamsters book at sixteen. He would always prod me whenever he saw me idly hanging around his house. “Get a Job,” he’d say and I’d respond,  “No one is hiring”.  This would infuriate him. He’d yell “ Damn it Sean, it’s the law of averages, one thousand, one hundred, ten and one, knock on a thousand doors, one hundred will open, ten will be serious, one will pay for the effort”.

As I got older I realized it was easier to listen to him and stay out of his way than it was to laze around the house and get screamed at. Fast-forward thirty-five years and even though Dad isn’t with us anymore, I can still hear his words as if it was yesterday. And I think he’d be proud if he knew how much I believe in the law of averages as it relates to marketing and sales.

However,when it comes to flight training,  getting the message out is more difficult than teaching chandelles, lazy eights, or holding pattern entries. Experience is the toughest teacher because you take the test, then learn the lesson. Surviving the test is critical and with a limited marketing budget making mistakes can be costly.

Misspent marketing money is arguably worse than not advertising at all.

We’ve had limited success with print media. Our ads have appeared in the American Bonanza Society, Mooney Aircraft Pilots Association, Aviation Digest, and Atlantic Flyers magazines.   The nice thing about magazines is people can pick them up a various times and see your ad. It’s voluntary, if they don’t like your ad it doesn’t offend them and if it does they simply turn the page. The more popular magazines are very expensive to advertise in which is prohibitive to a business starting up.

Direct mail campaigns can be effective tools. We usually do one a quarter. These are usually oversized postcards. We get the names from the FAA where 14CFR61.60 specifies that pilots must report their address change within thirty days of moving, which keeps the list somewhat current. Each postcard mailing averages around $1.25 per name to send and the best of these yields about a one percent return. Getting a pile of them back as undeliverable or unable to forward is almost as upsetting as realizing that for every one hundred you send ninety nine will find their way into the trash, unread.

Web based advertising is the most cost effective method of delivering the message. A website offers an unlimited palette to hawk one’s wares for a small fixed monthly fee. The challenge with web-based marketing is driving traffic to your site and converting those visitors to customers. I have seen some amazing looking web sites that generate no activity. It’s like having a great billboard on a road that has no traffic.

I’ve kept a blog since I got my flight instructor ticket in 2003, which is a great way to introduce new customers, or prospects to your personality/teaching style without having to meet them in person.  I have had several people tell me that they felt like they already had known Judy and me from reading my blog. Backlinks from the blog to the website help with search engine ranking which is an added benefit. Blog’s like the website, are a low monthly cost (free) and you can place unlimited content on them.

Which brings in direct email. We’ve subscribed to Constant Contact since September 2010 and have found it to be the most cost effective means of distributing our message. I try to send a newsletter and a promotion advertisement out monthly. We started with a four hundred-name database, which has since grown to over twenty six hundred contacts. Email marketing is funny, some people love it and it can enrage many. We limit the amount of mail we send out to satisfy those who like it and to avoid ticking off those who don’t.

This will be sent to 2600 people and of that about two hundred will bounce due to things like mailbox quotas, change of address, people blocking our domain. Of the people who do receive them we average a 39.5% open rate and from that about a 20% click thru rate. One percent opt out using the unsubscribe link on we include to be in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.

We get a handful of people who report our messages as spam. Many of them will send me a nasty email prior to flagging our mail. Usually the messages are “how dare you” or “Who do you think you are sending me these messages, I’m a former NASA shuttle commander and I could teach you a thing about aviation”.  I respond to each and every one of them. It rarely satisfy's them and we get flagged anyway.

So when we hear about the shrinking pilot population being due to the lack of qualified flight instructors and training centers, remember that there are plenty of good people out there trying to grow their business. Getting their message out to the people who need their services is sometimes a whole lot more difficult to do than providing the instruction itself. Its something I've been learning a whole lot about over the past three years.

To those who've I've flown with thank you for your patronage. For those who I haven't flown with yet, I look forward to the opportunity to do so.

Both Sides Now

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Joni Mitchell’s song goes on to talk about clouds, love and life.  I remember hearing it on the radio when I was a young. As an adult and a pilot I’m reminded of it when I cleave a deck of clouds or I’m droning along through a layer

Many pilots can relate to the “so many things I could have done but the clouds got in the way” part. Sitting at the airport waiting for the fog to burn off while you know that every airport within 20 miles is already VFR, or poking up thru a broken layer to smooth air on top are a couple of the benefits of earning your instrument rating.

Naturally unless we have some extraordinary equipment to fly in, getting instrument rated will not allow us to fly in ice and we’d be foolish thinking we could fly through thunderstorms.

I have been flying instruments for a number of years and my experience the part  that resonates most with me is  "It's cloud illusions I recall-I really don't know clouds at all".

Even people with a lifetime of experience will tell you that every flight is different, every weather pattern brings its own challenges, and that why we need to practice to stay sharp. 

Aviation- My Favorite Mistake

“Did you know when you go it’s the perfect ending, to the bad day I’ve gotten used to spending? When you go all I know is you’re my favorite mistake.” –Sheryl Crow

As I was locking up the office yesterday this Sheryl Crow song popped into my head. There is no disputing that ever since I took my first flight lesson on 10/1/1984 I’ve been seriously preoccupied with flying airplanes of one type or another.

Recently I realized that aviation to me resembles an addictive behavior. Similar to any number of other addictions, flying calls to me each and every time I think I can abstain from it. Every one of these calls requires me to make ever-larger investments of life force and treasure to sate my ever-growing tolerance. Daily it seems like I need to do more and more to meet and maintain my buzz.

I earned my Private Pilot license two years after that first lesson on 9/9/1986. I rode with Ray Nobel in Cessna N95751 a 1985 Cessna 152. At the time the plane was only a year old, so what they say about students excelling when the equipment is new and in good shape is true.  It was a big goal of mine to have the license behind me by the time I got married on 10/11/1986. Everyone told me that if I didn’t get it done my new wife would put an end to my free spending ways.  Funny, Judy actually supported my flying, or should I say is an enabler of it.

Instrument, Commercial, Flight Instructor, and then ATP followed the Private. Then add in the seasonal requirements, necessary to maintain it all.  Second-class medicals every twelve months, Biennial Flight Reviews and Flight Instructor Refresher Clinic’s are required every twenty-four calendar months. In between that it’s Instrument Proficiency Checks every six months to keep you sharp. And just like an addiction all of this takes time and money from your life

Looking back across 2012 as I closed the gate to go home I started reflecting on the business of aviation and my role as a flight-training provider. I finished 2012 with 842 hours of dual instruction given which is a pretty good year up from 713 in 2011. Now any pilot will tell you flying eight hundred hours in a year is a good deal of time. This was revenue time and does not include times that I would just hop into an airplane and throw back an hour or two. Honestly I found most of it enjoyable despite some really annoying moments interspersed between the times when I was flying and when I wasn’t.

But when you look at the total hours flown it equates to about seventy hours a month. Still a good deal of flying but when you break that down further its only sixteen hours of work a week.  As a small business owner the flight instruction portion of my week is our product. It’s how we ring the register, keep the rent paid, the doors open and the lights on. So after flying my sixteen a week I do have a few other things that keep me busy for the balance of the roughly sixty hours a week I spend caring and feeding for Motion Sim.

I totaled the time because I’ve recently accepted a part time position working for a 135 operator and they needed some numbers to put next to my name as they started the vetting process. The offer couldn’t have come at a better time says the guy who is only billing seventeen hours each week.

But as I was attending the 135-ground school last week I was amazed at the knowledge level that the instructor and the other participants were exhibiting. Now all of them have worked there for a considerable amount of time but as the class progressed I realized that flying in this environment is going to require acquiring an instructional level of knowledge about another chapter of the federal aviation regulations, the aircraft specific information, their operation specifications and general operations manual while learning to fly the airplanes.

It was like throwing a gauntlet down, all of this new stuff to learn and exciting new airplanes to fly.

Oh Boy here we go again.

The iPad. Which Aviation App is the best? Just pick one

I’ve heard a lot of chatter from friends and associates about using an iPad in flight and which aviation application is the superior product. At this point I think the aviation press and bloggers have wasted much ink and pixels about their particular preference. That said I’m going to chime in and clarify it for those of you who are still sitting on the fence in less than ten words.

Just go buy one! What are you waiting for?

I usually attend the two bookend aviation events that start and end the air show season. In April I attend the Sun and Fun fly in at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland Florida and I also attend EAA’s Airventure Oshkosh the last week of July. I’ve been going to the Sun and Fun on and off since 1990 and I’ve attended every Airventure since 2001 consecutively.

Pricing out the aeronautical charts for either one of those trips will explain to you why buying an iPad and ANY charting application is a wise move. Using Sporty’s as a pricing comparison I checked what it would take to fly from my home base in Danbury to Lakeland. I would plan the trip as either IFR or VFR based on whether the weather enroute met my personal minimums, so when purchasing charts for the voyage I naturally I would purchase both formats.  Sportys.com has a chart doctor function where you enter your departure and your destination and whether you’ll be flying VFR or IFR, then it selects the charts you would be need to make the trip based on a route width that the pilot selects.  I chose a 30 mile width and the application chose for me $124.25 worth of charts to make that trip. I added these to my shopping cart so I could see what the selections were. I eliminated the WAC and the TAC charts and two of the sectionals they chose that I didn’t really feel were necessary.  Then I added the extra approach plates for my enroute stops and that brought my total to $93.35. Shipping was the same at $15 so when you add it all up one trip to Florida and back would set me back $108.35

Lets look at the Oshkosh trip. This one is a bit different because unlike going to Florida travelling west in our latitudes generally means we’ll be heading directly into or paralleling fronts. For that reason the charting options must be expanded to include most of the possible routes you might be required to take.

Heading to Oshkosh from Connecticut the big decision for me is always to take the northerly route through upstate and western New York across Ontario Canada then into Michigan or Southerly through Pennsylvania Ohio Indiana Illinois then into Wisconsin. The northerly route usually adds another decision, which is to fly over Lake Michigan or around it. Around the lake to the north adds an additional two sectional charts and another enroute.  Planning for either eventuality makes it a $143 expense to buy the charts for that trip. Considering the event occurs at the end of July the charts usually expire on your way home, technically requiring you to buy another set for the ride back.

So for me to make just those two trips a year would cost $251 in charts that would eventually end up starting my woodstove vs. the $170 that Foreflight Professional or Wing-X Pro cost. And that’s just two trips. What about all the other flying for the rest of the year?  Regardless of your application preference it makes a lot more sense to use the electronic version without consideration all of the neat things features you don’t get with the paper like geo-location.

Last July heading to Oshkosh the iPad was instrumental in our being able to arrive within one day of travel. We dodged some monster storms this past year and flew the entire trip VFR in what I would call marginal VFR at best. Where the iPad really excelled was it gave us the ability to perform ad-hoc routing and course adjustments based on what we saw out the window combined with the data we were receiving from the XM weather product installed in our Mooney.  This was both on the ground for the big picture planning and while we were zipping along down low through myriad airspace and controlling authorities.

The routing for that trip is the subject of a lengthy posting itself, but in a nutshell we circumnavigated bad weather as we wove through Charlie and Bravo airspace in Cleveland, Toledo, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Chicago and Milwaukee We did this VFR with advisories as if we were IFR. So we were talking and squawking to ATC the entire time. It was the only way were able to get where we needed without the normal restrictive IFR routings and altitudes we would be given approaching or going through Chicago.  Additionally flying IFR would have put us in the clouds unable to see where the weather we needed to avoid was. This flexibility, flying VFR in marginal weather came from us having every chart in the national airspace system available to us in the two iPad’s as we flew.

By being able to pinch the display to zoom in from a sectional chart to a TAC we could see where we were going along with the ceilings and floors of the airspace and how that worked with the present weather.  I would devise a routing and Judy would input it into the Garmin 496 and we could see from the XM display how close we would be to the next cell if we chose that routing. 

We would have never been able to accomplish this if we had to keep track of, take out, fold or unfold the next chart and attempt to figure out what we would need to do next. Ultimately we ended circling the south west side of Lake Michigan through Gary Indiana and Chicago then Milwaukee at two thousand feet. This was a routing we had never taken before but we were completely aware of where we were in relation to the airspace and weather by the ever-present geo location icon moving across the map displaying our location exactly.

While we had the Stratus ADS-B product on board the resolution of the weather depicted as we got away from the coast was lacking. Like any other technology it is bound to get better as it matures and is more widely implemented. But for now lets just say that my XM Aviator Pro subscription @$100 a month is well worth the price and with the ADS-B products I have flown with -you get what you pay for. That in and of itself is a whole other posting for another time.