Great.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to testify here today.
As the owner of a small flight school and the manager of a municipal airport, I believe I am quite aware of the different challenges facing flight schools in Canada. I do not want to sound negative, but given the fact that this committee is focusing on the challenges facing flight schools in Canada, I will limit my observations to the problems and not discuss what might still be going well.
You have all heard the statistics regarding the pilot shortage that has already started. What is in my opinion even more important is the fact that there are almost no flight instructors available anymore.
If we are at the beginning of an important shortage of pilots, how are we going to train the required pilots if we are already out of flight instructors? One of the traditional career paths for young pilots was to obtain their commercial licence and then become flight instructors for a few years in order to gain experience. New pilots are now bypassing this path, because they get hired by companies that are short of pilots right after they obtain their licence.
When I hired my first flight instructor a few years ago, I chose to offer him much better than average industry conditions. I paid him a decent salary on an annual basis in order to provide a more stable income and better overall quality of life. This strategy worked well for both the company and the instructor. Despite these conditions, I have been trying to find a new full-time flight instructor for four months now, and I have not been able to get one single resumé, let alone hire somebody.
Some would suggest that the free market will always win, and if flight schools were to pay flight instructors even better—a lot better—then some pilots would choose to become flight instructors. However, by doing so, we would have no choice, as businesses, but to pass on these additional costs to the customer.
lt is already financially difficult nowadays for the average would-be pilot to afford a quite expensive training. The problem would then be pushed towards the rest of the aviation industry. The pilot shortage would become even more critical, because fewer candidates would be able to afford the training. The lack of instructors, in my view, is the number one challenge we are facing now.
The second challenge facing flight schools is something that you may or may not have heard about yet. The federal government and Nav Canada are concentrating all the services they offer on the major airports in Canada. These airports are already quite busy and cater mostly to major airlines. A few exceptions, like Saint–Hubert airport near Montreal, which are not the destination of major airlines, are operating at full capacity already.
One would think that it would be simple and logical to move some flight training activities away from major centres. This would alleviate congestion problems and noise problems, for example. However, flight schools like mine that operate away from these major centres must operate on smaller aerodromes that are not supported by Nav Canada and/or the federal government. These aerodromes were ceded to the municipalities in 2003, over 15 years ago, and are now in serious need of infrastructure work. The municipalities that own them simply cannot afford these required upgrades.
Nav Canada is also shutting down services at an alarming rate. Navaids and instrument approaches are no longer supported by Nav Canada, and both navaids and the approaches are being decommissioned at all but the major airports. How are we supposed to train new pilots if the major airports are overcrowded and the smaller ones no longer have the infrastructure required to support flight operations and flight training? We can train private pilots without access to conventional navaids and instrument approaches, but we cannot train professional pilots without them. lt is another serious problem that has been creeping up for quite a few years now, and it is not getting any better.
My third and last point has to do with Transport Canada. lt is risky for a small school like mine to criticize the agency that controls all of our operations, but I believe this committee needs to hear about this other challenge that we face. Transport Canada should be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. lt is getting more difficult every day to get any kind of services without delays at Transport Canada. This is true at every level of our operations. lt would seem that Transport Canada is seriously short-staffed. Some serious inefficiencies could be addressed first, and the overall situation would improve.
Another problem with Transport Canada is the need to update and upgrade the way they treat flight training in Canada. The current system is old if not completely archaic. For example, the entire system is based on the number of training hours. A competency-based training system would be a lot more efficient and could possibly reduce the overall cost of training pilots.
Written examinations produced by Transport Canada are mostly based on “catches” instead of focusing on what's important.
Finally, Transport Canada is too slow to adapt to new realities. For example, no professional pilot today navigates with a paper chart, and absolutely nobody navigates with a sextant. Despite this, Transport Canada refuses to allow modern tools like Foreflight, for example, in pilot training. It may still be important to at least be familiar with paper charts and old navigation techniques, but to simply refuse to allow schools to use and teach with modern navigation tools is quite simply unacceptable. We need to train pilots with the real skills they need today and the skills they will require tomorrow, not with the skills required 30 years ago.
Thank you. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.