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Welcome to Females in Aviation, episode 15. We are here today with Lara Garte, who is a five-time master flight instructor. Our purpose today is to enter into a frank discussion as to the feasibility of flight instructing as a career versus flight instructing as a stepping stone. Welcome, Lara.
Thank you. You're welcome. Tell me a little bit about how you started flying and how you came to be an instructor. Well, I started flying in high school.
It was something I always wanted to do. And there was an aviation explorer program through Boy Scouts. When I was in high school, it was something that was fairly new in our area, the idea of a Boy Scout group that was COED. And this one in particular was formed to allow young people to explore aviation careers, not just pilot, but that obviously that was the primary focus.
But it allowed us ways in, kind of a career exploration path, if you will. And the Boy Scouts looked for advisors for the group that were in aviation. There was a flight instructor. There was a guy that was a pilot in the military.
There were a couple of airline pilots and a corporate pilot. I don't remember exactly where everybody was in it. But it gave all of us high school-aged kids a way to evaluate the careers from people who were doing them. And I was part of that first group.
It was mostly fellows and a few of us girls. And it gave me not only a way to contact, but a way to ask questions. It gave me an avenue in the flight training so that I could get started. And I just kind of opened the door.
Oh, that's great. Yeah, I was, I think in junior high, actually, I joined Civil Air Patrol, which is still a viable option today. But what you're talking about is another path that young people might take to get involved in aviation. Yeah.
And the rest of my background is my grandmother had sold her to come in the 40s. Oh, awesome. So I grew up with that story and listening to her talent. And I mean, it obviously had quite some time after she did it that I was born and she did it before she got married.
But it was neat. Yeah, very neat. It was very cool. So when I decided, hey, this is something I went into, found the way in with aviation explorers.
And my parents said, we're not going to take this. Do it, you do it on your own. So I went out and got a part-time job work, evenings, a couple evenings a week, and most weekends, to pay for flight training. I sold it between summer of junior and junior year.
And I got my license about two months before graduation senior year. Wow, that's awesome. I paid for it myself. You were one motivated teenager.
The victory was very sweet, partly because it was, you know, hey, I have a license, but partly because I knew it was mine. Yeah, you did it all on your own. Yeah, I had applied to a couple of aviation universities at that point, got accepted, and got told, hey, you're going to have to not fly the first year because we're going to let your classmates catch up to you. And I said, hey, I didn't do this in high school.
So I could wait for somebody to catch up. I was in the university in Fort Wayne. Got a bachelor's degree in geology, and used all the money I'd saved up that would have been for dorms and that kind of stuff to fly. Oh, good for you.
So you did like training with FBOs then, rather than a college? Right. All of my flight training has been through FBOs, no college at all. So I got an infomeriting in a commercial before I graduated from college, got my CFI, about five years after graduation, got married, and had kids, and all of that stuff.
And didn't work in aviation for the next several years. OK. So there was a young married couple, no money. There were years where my entire logbook page was one year for the whole page.
Oh, OK. So there wasn't any money to fly. So at some point, you found the time, was it the kids getting older or? No, I got divorced.
And had a job as an analyst, not at all in aviation, but started flying skydivers on weekends for grocery money and flight experience. Got my CFI and started doing a little freelance work, nothing that was going to pay to build or anything, but a little freelance work and got laid off from my analyst job. And while I was on layoffs looking for another job, started flight instructing, working for the flight school at Fort Wayne International. And when I finally got my call back, said, you know what, I'm going to try this full time.
My call back wasn't going to be real good. And I at that point developed a little bit of a clientele and thought, you know, I'm just sick to scratch the quad every which way around aviation, but stay in it. And I'm going to try it. And it was scary in the whole world to those single moms.
And what year without them? That would have been in about 2000. So when it's worked for the flight school, and anybody who's flight instructed knows that when you're trying to feed yourself with it, yeah, you're there a lot. You don't turn down work.
So a lot of long days, a lot of evenings. But you do what you have to do. Well, I got married in 2005 to my second husband. And in 2007, the FBO about 20 miles north of there came up for bid.
And so we put a bid in. And about six months later, they called back and said, we want you to take it. So we started an FBO on September 8, 2000 and spent. And I started flight instruction there.
Oh, that's great. So you pretty much manage your own flight school then. I do. And I work with the FBO as a flight instructor.
I can comfortably say, in my situation, just being a flight instructor is not enough. I could not have said my family just doing that. You know, I've supplemented it with flying some corporate flying skydivers. Whatever I needed to do to make ends meet, I was willing to do.
But my primary income and my primary focus was done flight instruction. It's allowed me to have family time that I wouldn't have if I was flying a lot of overnight or airline or something like that. So what type of aircraft are you flying? Well, primarily, SESN1 52, 172, and SESN1 82 are G.
We use for high performance complex, CFI commercial instruction. I'm also tailwheel rated. So I now own a J3, which is what my grandma followed in. Oh, too cool.
And we also have a letter of authorization from the CIDD though to do scenic tours. And we have a walk up YMS 5.5 plane. I do a lot of work in owner-owned airplanes, just in mind. So I work with people in their own aircraft, some tailwheel, some high performance, some complex, a little bit of everything.
OK, so money obviously isn't as wonderful as you would like it to be. But that aside, what do you like about instructing? You're the best part of everybody today. Very well put.
If you can't find job satisfaction doing this, you're not trying. People work, they do their eight-hour shift, so they can come to the airport and see you. And when somebody comes in the door and they're happy to see you, I don't care if it's your worst possible day. If you can't find job satisfaction there, you're not looking.
As a flight instructor, we have the ability to create new pilots to share an journey that's very personal. We can all think back to our first solo or our first long cut country by ourselves or all those huge milestones you get to share. I can think back to every first solo that I signed someone off for as well. It's kind of like a bird's kicking her babies out of a nest or something.
It's just a really exciting day. I totally feel like a mother bird. Each person, their spouse's name, their child's name, their kid's name, it's a journey for everybody. And you take that piece of it.
And those people become friends for the most part. I mean, there's some that come and go. But these are folks that they're excited to see you. And they want to do this.
And they want to be good at it. And you're helping with that journey. It's kind of like I tell people, it's kind of like learning to walk. Only this time, both of us get to remember it.
When you teach your kids to walk, you're so excited for them. And they don't remember it at all. But when you teach them how many to fly, that first lesson, where the rudder's totally baffled them, where, you know, jeez, am I ever going to get this? And you get to that first solo point, and you turn them loose with the airplane, and after you do all the paperwork, and find everything off and all that good stuff.
I do not be happy with that, Joy. I totally feel what you're saying. And I started instructing at an FBO like you. And then I was fortunate enough to have an instructing job at a community college.
And I used to pretty much what you're saying when I met with other professors and instructors at the college. I'm like, I got the best class going, because every single person in my class wants to be there. Whether it was the ground school or the actual flying, every single person that walks through the door in my classroom wants to be there. This is not a required course.
Yeah. So it was very. And it's challenging to stay relevant and to keep your perspective about why, because we all have less than ideal days. And today here, it's discussed in the 2425 knot.
That's a challenging day to do flight instructions. But you find something to learn in each flight. I think early on, I learned more than the student learned. Oh, yes.
Now I try to dig deep sometimes in the repertoire to get somebody that's struggling with something, try to find a new way to correlate, a new way to put it into perspective so that it makes sense. Because everybody comes to the table with a little bit different experiences, a little bit different background. And part of the job that I feel I have to do is to figure out how to take what they know and relate it to what they don't know. And we'll have conversations with students where if they've sailed about, OK, we can use that.
If they've been in a canoe going down a river, OK, I can use that. I had one person who had done ballroom dancing. I said, you remember how it felt to have two left feet when you started that? Yeah.
Well, there's going to be some similarities here. Oh, it sounds like you're a very creative instructor, Laura. I like that. I think you have to be.
I think if you're not, then at some point you're going to have somebody, they get to a plateau where they're frustrated where they just don't feel like they're progressing and you have to switch gears and say, OK, come out of it from a different way. So, Laura, what's the funniest experience you've had as a flight instructor? I had a student one time. He, great guy.
He was a great friend. But in the process of learning, he was an older, basically, he had had some piece of equipment in his life that he had utilized a lot where the mixture to lean it was to push it in. And if your enrichment was to pull it out. And in a few, that was totally backwards.
And I don't know. How many times do you think you can say it? No, no, push it the other way. No, no, go the other way.
So every time we come into the pattern, the mixture rich and he tried to pull it out. Well, he beat me one day. And he pulled it to idle cut off. Tyler just drained out his face.
Oh, my God. The mind is reached over, and I very calmly push it back in. And he comes back to life. We land.
I mean, he's taken like a leaf. And the area he says, how flying is more than just what I say? I mean, he's got a lot of defenses. So much more memorable than you saying it.
Right. And I said, oh, boy, he said, oh, never give it again. Nothing like hands-on learning. And he would go on to tell other people.
He would sit in groups and he'd say, oh, you don't. Let me tell you about this. Stupid thing I did. And I said, you know what?
It's not stupid. I think everybody has done that at some point. Yeah, you're reminding me of an experience I had. Actually, my student was a female.
And we're barreling down the runway. And she's not pulling back. She's just barrelin straight down the runway. And I said, pull back.
And she pulled the throttle back. And we hardly have any runway left. Yeah, another one of those funny moments. Well, yeah, I mean, you forget when we're in it, you forget that there's vocabulary issues.
There's just knowledge issues. I'm working with a new student right now. And he said, you know, I just, I can't find all the knots when I want to. I know what I want to do.
I just don't know which thing I need to do. I said, it'll get easier. So you're not just teaching them. It's not the same as teaching someone to drive a car.
And the way I approach it is I tell my new student, say, what, when I corrupt your entire life, when you're driving down the road going, yeah, I can land in that field right there. Or, hey, look, we have a crosswind right now. I said, or when you start critiquing the ducks that are landing on the pond, I said, I know that I have you. The blind and finger.
Those are the kind of pilots that I'm thrilled to be a part of their learning process. Because it really does change how they look at things. This isn't something that you just do. And then you put a garage and don't do.
It's not like getting highly out of the spring. You can take the pilots out of the crowd. When an airplane flies over, there the ones won't not. Right.
I never could understand that students that could get to make it to solo and then never come back. I'm like, how could you walk away from this once you've soloed on your plane? You know, I had a couple of people where that was their bucket list with just to solo. Right.
They didn't want to do anything else. And I thought, well, OK, I wouldn't be happy with that. You know, and then you think about, I said, before sometimes you had day, well, we'll have a corporate crew come in here. And I refer to the club as my vacation.
20 minutes at a time, that's vacation. OK. You just go out and you remember why you learned in the first place. Right.
And a club's a greater plane to do that. And we've had corporate crews here that, you know, you get that out. And they stopped and I walk in and they go look at it. Man, wouldn't that be awesome to go fly?
If you want to go? Yeah. You have to look back and remember why we started to begin with. Because it'll become a job if you allow it to become a job.
I think that's really what occurred with me. And you know, you can always look back at that path not taken. And I encountered so much garbage as a corporate pilot that we're not even going to go there. But there were so many times that I look back and said, I had such a nice job at the college instructing.
What have I done that all my life? Would that have been nice? I tell you, it's hard financially. Right.
It's rewarding. There's a whole lot of job satisfaction. But it's for me, it's very difficult financially. Because our industry pays pilot food experience.
And it ups the dancent doesn't acceptable means of compensation. So you've always got somebody that's on the well end of the totem pole trying to work their way up, not getting paid. Pay on paid at a time if you want to send the right seat. Right.
It's hard. It's really hard. I don't have a solution for it. But I wish there was one.
Yeah, the flight instructing position is so much used as the stepping stone to build time and get to the quote better job. It saddens me, I guess, that flight instructing can't just be some people's goal in their profession. Yeah. It should be.
And it shouldn't be that people are willing to take a golf pro more per hour than a flight instructor. Right. There's pieces of this that if there was a way to change it, so that it was a viable opportunity to get a lot of people lying on the flight instructor to the second job. Yes.
So what about their analyst job or whatever they do and then they find structing evenings because they love it. But they know they can't afford to do it full time. And what about the colleges these days, Laura? Are they still low pay for flight instructors?
I mean, there are so many professional flight training programs in colleges and universities now. How are those instructors being paid? I don't actually know. I know a lot of times it's upperclassmen.
They're teaching underclassments. Yeah. See, when I was instructing at Lansing Community College, I think minimum wage at the time was maybe $3, $3, $3, $50. And I was making $10 an hour.
So it was like huge. I thought I was rich. And at one point, I thought I really need to go get bachelor's degree instead of just this associate's degree. And I looked into Western Michigan University.
And I was already instructing at this point. So I looked at Western Michigan University. And they had a flight training program. And I thought, I could go there and make my 10 bucks an hour and pay for my college.
And when I checked on it, they were paying $4 an hour. Because they were doing exactly what you said. That was a time building position for students that are coming through their program learning how to fly. Yeah.
And when I started, you didn't for ground time, which I do. Right. To keep it inexpensive, because there's this. And this is really expensive.
You need to try and keep it as cheap as you can. Well, I don't feel that way anymore. I'm a professional. Good for you.
And I think that the challenge is getting those folks up to available rate that allows them to live on it. Because available rate, the flight instructor doesn't usually keep the whole billable rate. There's workers benefit that be paid. And the other part, for me, that's kind of broken about flight instruction is that the career path is, and I don't know how it is regionally around.
But for me, you only get paid for what you build. So it's almost like professional services. If you only fly four hours a week, you only paid four hours a week. Now, if you have a week of bad weather, you're going hungry.
You are. And that's why you don't turn down work. You're not going to go up in dangerous conditions or anything. But there's a lot of nights a lot of weekends.
You're really accommodating to whatever those students are. I struggle with not wanting four evenings. Because I'm at the FBO all day anyway. And I'm here seven days a week a lot of times.
So that becomes your normal and your schedule. And that's part of the downside. But that's fine. It's the 24-7 world for a pilot.
Right. So I guess it's kind of disheartening for me. I saw you on, I don't even recall, which Facebook page now. And that you were a five-time master flight instructor.
And I thought, oh, great. People are really able to make a career out of flight instructing. Now, I wish I could have done that. And so I've got to talk to this lady.
But it still isn't. I think you really have to be flexible. And you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. If I didn't work at the FBO, I wouldn't be able to show them gaps.
Because on those days where it's blowing sideways or rainy, there has to be something else to fill in whole. I don't think our industry values it as a viable career path just yet. Yeah. I hope that changes.
But it doesn't sound like it's changed much since the 70s when I was doing it. So what do you think is people's biggest misconception about a flight instructor? A flight good question. Or about flight instructing.
What's the biggest misconception about flight instructing? I think people look at it as you do when you don't have any experience to get experience. Right. In my mind, I wish that flight instructing was the pinnacle of a career, not the beginning.
Because I think that veteran pilots potentially have so much more real world experience to draw from. Right. Somebody bring it new. Well, correct.
And I know I have 8,000 hours. Almost 75% of it is flight instructing. That's a lot. Yeah.
That's a lot. I student certainly rest easy in your care. Well, and I try to make pilots that I want to fly with. So most of my guys will say that they feel totally comfortable, maybe a little over-prepared.
And I'm OK with that. I want them to go to that checker. I feel like confident, not feeling nervous. Right.
Very good. Would you like to give the name of your operation and location in case people listen to this and would like to come and fly with you? Sure. I am at the Calcini Airport in Auburn, Indiana.
And our FBO is Century Aviation. Our website is www.flywithcentury.com. And our phone number is 260971845. OK.
Very good. I feel good that the people that I've fallen with and the pilots that I've worked with hopefully have the tools to deal with whatever they face. I hope. Well, I think it sounds to me like you're doing it.
I think you do. It sounds to me like you're doing it. It's a job well done. And obviously, you wouldn't be a five-time master instructor if you weren't doing some things right as well.
I thank you so much for sharing. Thank you very much for asking. It's been a pleasure. Sound of X courtesy of freesound.org, number 12815 Jillian Callahan, and number 262259, Shady Dape.