Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased to be here this evening talking to Motion No. 177, which directs the transportation committee to study flight schools and their infrastructure. I want to talk about a few different things and I am going to be brief as I have a lot to talk about.
I want to talk about my personal experience in getting my pilot's licence. I remember as a young child going to air shows and being fascinated with the concept and the whole idea of flight, the freedom of flight, the wonder of flight. Growing into my adult years it continued to fascinate me, but I was scared to fly. I had never been in an airplane until I was a young adult. I was frightened to take that first move and my wife played a bit of a trick on me. She bought me an introductory flight lesson for my birthday and I had to do it. It was something that I needed to overcome and it was a wonderful experience and I let it go at that.
However, some time later I was reading the paper and she pointed out ground school training. She told me that I enjoyed airplanes so much and the whole concept of flying, why not take ground school, as I did not have to fly. It was reasonably inexpensive at $400 or $500 and I understood the whole theory and concept of flight. She tricked me again. I think she knew that once I was at ground school there would be tremendous peer pressure to actually fly the airplane. Of course, I succumbed to that peer pressure and I did go up with an instructor. It did not take long until I got the bug.
I took my training at Harv's Air Service, in my riding. It is based out of Steinbach and operates a flight school just outside of St. Andrews, Manitoba at the St. Andrews Airport. Harv and Betty Penner, together with their sons, Adam, Luke and Greg, operate the flight school. They have operated it for 30 or 40 years. They have trained thousands of pilots, many of whom fly for a lot of our commercial airline companies today. They do a wonderful job and have a fantastic safety record. I look at some of the challenges they faced at the flight school, such as staffing challenges, getting and retaining qualified instructors, but they also faced challenges with sourcing students.
I can attest to that because when I started the ground school training, it was relatively inexpensive. Once I began flying, the costs per hour to get training in an airplane were quite significant and this was some 18 years ago. By the time I completed my training, the cost was probably about $5,500 or $6,000. To become a private pilot today is north of $10,000, so it is not an inexpensive exercise.
This is a challenge for our flight schools. They need to attract students at a reasonable cost. Not everyone can afford to take flying lessons. When I go to air shows today, I see boys and girls lined up at the fence watching the airplanes and wishing they could fly them. There are a few things I need to point out that a study would do. A study would determine what the needs of flight schools are. We know there is a pilot shortage. We know there is going to be an increasing pilot shortage in the years to come and we need to address that shortage somehow. A good way to do that is to encourage folks to get into pilot training and to ensure it is affordable. One way we can do that is to look at ways of decreasing costs.
Flight school operators have all kinds of costs. They have the cost of airplanes, which is based on the American dollar and we know how that fluctuates. Right now it is to our disadvantage in Canada. They also have to buy fuel, which is very expensive. With the proposed Liberal government carbon tax, the cost of fuel is going to go up and that is going to negatively impact flight schools. We need to make sure that does not happen.
We need to make sure that we provide them with the facilities that are required to operate a safe and effective flight school. We need to make sure there is infrastructure money available for municipal airports, but also for flight schools to take full advantage of that to make sure we can get pilots trained.
The other aspect I want to touch on briefly is the whole aspect of training military pilots. A lot of them have come through flight schools, but a lot are also trained directly by our military. We know, based on the Auditor General's report that came out recently, that we have a significant shortfall in technicians and pilots. In fact, we do not even have enough pilots to fly the airplanes we have. That is a big concern to me.
We need to ensure we do not underfund our military, like the government has been doing. We need to ensure we get on with our fighter jet replacement program, that we get that contest happening sooner than later, that we do not buy old, rusty airplanes from Australia but look at current technology so we can attract people into our military who will want to fly the latest and greatest. We need to ensure we also provide our troops adequately with the best equipment available for them to do their job.
I am happy to support the motion.