The Flight Instructor's Survival Guide by McMahon Arlynn; Machado Rod;

Author:McMahon, Arlynn; Machado, Rod; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Transportation, Flight Instruction and Piloting
Publisher: Aviation Supplies & Academics, Inc.

First, a flight school is a business. A business owner has to protect the investment in generating and keeping happy clients or the business will not survive. Professionalism doesn’t have a practical test standard, it has a customer opinion standard. When it came to the customer, I had to demonstrate clearly that I recognized the problem and I was dealing with it cleanly, quickly, and for the customer’s benefit. Otherwise, the business might lose a customer. Clients expect their time and energy to be well spent.

Chris

I’ve trained, hired, supervised, and/or mentored hundreds of flight instructors over the course of three decades. The one that stands apart from all others in my memory is Chris. He wasn’t the best pilot or even the best flight instructor. What stood him apart was that he knew how to be valuable to those around him.

Chris came to us still in his early twenties. His resume was already full of work experience, ranging from delivering newspapers to flipping hamburgers to harvesting tobacco. Part-time jobs, odd jobs, seasonal jobs—it appeared he appreciated a job and knew how to work. College had taken him six years, but he’d paid his own way and graduated with his education paid-in-full. I already respected the man for his work ethic.

Chris enjoyed living rent-free. He had built “a tiny house.” He designed it with the help of a friend and they did all the carpentry, electrical, and plumbing. He showed it to me on his YouTube channel. It was a self-sufficient, well-appointed, man-cave built on a 12-foot flatbed. It featured a loft bedroom, heat, composting toilet, and rainwater collection as well as a solar panel to recharge the battery that powered his TV, kitchen appliances, and other necessities. With a quick hook-up to his truck, he was free to reposition his tiny home at a moment’s notice for a weekend camping trip in the mountains or near a cool lake in the hot summer. Chris moved his tiny house from Iowa to Kentucky to work with us.

He had graduated college in December and started working for me in March. At that time of year, we were still experiencing overnight temperatures below freezing. Early mornings at the flight school often fell behind schedule. Getting the fleet ready to fly meant charging batteries, preheating engines, and removing frost. One day Chris walked into my office. “Chief, my schedule is not all that full yet. Would it be worth it to you to pay me a little extra to come in at o-dark-thirty to start turning icebergs into flying machines so that the instructors with clients don’t fall behind?” Yes it was.

As spring progressed, our problems turned buggy. In Kentucky, it’s a full-time job cleaning dead bugs from the airplane windshields once the weather turns warm. Chris was first up with an offer to do the job that everyone else hated. We continued him on a small base salary to compensate him for about 10 hours a week for his many talents, which he put to good use when not flying.

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