| Maximizing training efficiency is desirable in many areas of business. The ever increasing costs of flight training combined with a predicted shortage of pilots have resulted in steps being taken to improve flight training efficiency. In the past, the majority of airline pilots received their flight training in the military. Over time a growing portion of airline aviators have been educated in collegiate programs. Efficiency is paramount in collegiate aviation in order to control costs and assure that flight training is completed before graduation. Today collegiate programs cannot factor in training effectiveness when pricing services or setting instructor compensation. The problem is that the relationship between instructor experience characteristics and training efficiency, as measured by student completion times, in part-141 collegiate aviation programs is unknown. This quantitative study involved analysis of secondary data in the form of 83,942 flight training records covering 1031 students enrolled in a collegiate aviation program in Dubuque, Iowa, who were taught by 100 flight instructors during a seven-year period. A series of regressions was performed relating private pilot, instrument rating, commercial pilot, and multi-engine rating student completion times to dual instruction given, months of tenure, employment status, instructor level, and total flight hours. An equation relating instrument completion time to total flight time and months of tenure was found to explain 16.89% of completion time (p-value of 9.97x10-06). Commercial pilot completion times were found to have a relationship with dual given, months tenure, total time, and instructor level with respective R-squared values of 0.04778, 0.043843, 0.040508, and 0.03992, and p-values of 0.01600, 0.02117, 0.02685, and 0.02800. An equation relating commercial completion times to dual given and months tenure was found to explain 7.477% of completion time (p-value of 0.0102). An equation relating multi-engine rating completion times to total time and dual given was found to explain 8.641% of completion time (p-value of 0.01651). Total flight time was found to be the strongest overall predictor of teaching effectiveness. Future research involving other universities with different demographics, climate, and training methods was recommended to determine the extent to which these results can be applied to other programs. |
