Splitting Costs of Flying a Club Demo Ride?

On Tuesday, April 8, 2014 10:35:33 AM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:
Take a broader view and look at the outcome that you desire. Ideally, some power pilots would become serious students, get their add-on ratings (quickly) and buy private gliders (or become occasional users of club ships, pay dues and volunteer time to keep the club running).



If your training program is already operating at full capacity (instructors have no spare time to give rides), is it a mistake to recruit more students that would serve to overburden the instructors and degrade the training experience for everyone involved?



You have limited club ships and instructor hours. Your capacity to service new students is limited. So demoing 19 pilots in a short period of time might overload your capacity to take them to the next step. Having a temporary glut of students increases the chances of those students getting bogged down in club style training and dropping out of the sport. Best to avoid this outcome.



It would be better to have a steady stream of candidate pilots getting rides over an extended period of time. I'd suggest that if you have spare instructional capacity, that you give say two rides a week, and continue at that rate until new students start to strain instructional and club ship resources. When your training program reaches capacity, suspend taking new rides. Restart the rides when training capacity is once again starting to become available. In the meantime get more CFI-Gs to increase instructional capacity.



Perhaps it makes sense to give preference in the 'ride queue' to those who want to take an initial flying lesson. Is a pilot that just wants to 'take a ride' less likely to progress to the next stage? Those pilots might go to commercial operation and pay the tourist rate. It would be most productive (in terms of increasing active membership) to keep your instructors focused on giving 'initial lessons'.



Your most efficient way to boost membership would be to have a pilot take an initial lesson, get hooked, and then go to a commercial flight school to get their add-on rating in a concentrated period of training. Then they come back, become active in the club, get a field checkout and a couple lessons as a advanced student, volunteer, pay dues and become a productive club member.

Our experience is that 1 in 4 of our rides off the street becomes interested enough to buy a 4 flight introductory package and about 1 in 3 of those join. With a group like described above, I would guess on a better stick rate of about 1 in 3.
One useful way to not burn out instructors is to not make them give rides. Let the commercial guys do that so the instructors can instruct.
FWIW
UH