You Can Fly: What winning means

As part of AOPA’s You Can Fly program—which has a four-pronged approach to make flying more accessible and more affordable that includes encouraging best practices in flight training—the survey recognizes instructors and flight schools that demonstrate excellence in educational quality, customer focus, community, and information sharing with Flight Training Experience Awards. The program names both “Best” schools and “Best” instructors in each of five regions across the country and one nationwide winner in each category.

So, what’s the big deal?

How’s an increase in business for the winners of up to 40 percent sound to you?

“My school’s managers told me that the wait time is now up to six weeks before we can pair them with a flight instructor,” said Zoan Harclerode, the 2017 national best flight instructor. “We continue to hire experienced flight instructors, but management tells me it is hard to keep up with the 35- to 40-percent growth over the same period last year.”

Harclerode is an instructor for Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Flight Training Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. She appeared in the February 2018 issue of Flight Training magazine.

“Management also told me that after the article they were getting calls from pilots in the Midwest requesting to fly with me personally,” she said. “These are good times to be a pilot and I am all too happy to be a positive part of our industry’s success.”

According to Chris Moser, AOPA senior director of flight training education, the 2017 survey saw 1,048 schools and 2,012 CFIs nominated to be considered in the survey. In addition, AOPA shared “report cards” with 187 schools and 79 CFIs (see “Free Feedback,” page 52).

“The ones that win awards see their business ramp up,” Moser said. “We’ve refined and improved the survey each year, and each year we have increased the responses. More and more schools are interested.”

Harclerode isn’t the only one seeing phenomenal results from the survey. “Winning the award for best flight school in the Southeast has had a very positive impact on our business,” said Faith Drewry of the Florida Aviation Center. “People call us and say they saw our name in the awards list. We had a waiting list of about 10 people at any given time before receiving the award; our waiting list is now up to 25 people and about three to four months long.”

Winning has its rewards, and detractions: “Attracting CFIs is a challenge; despite very competitive pay, we still need to find three more full-time instructors to meet our customer demand. I am hoping CFIs want to work for an award-winning flight school as well,” said Drewry.

Anyone want a job flying in the Florida sunshine?