Future-Proof—The Canterbury Way

By Leigh Neil.

The decision to purchase a new fleet of training aircraft is a brave call in the current economic climate, so the decision by Canterbury Aero Club/International Aviation Academy to purchase six new planes could, at first glance, be viewed as somewhat rash. However, as Leigh Neil found out, nothing could be further from the truth.

Easter weekend 2009 in Christchurch was a succession of gloriously sunny, warm autumn days; weather which should have seen any self-respecting CEO spending time with family, or pursuing some personal hobby or interest. However, instead of relaxing on Good Friday, Chris English, the CEO of the Canterbury Aero Club (CAC), was joined by the club’s CFI, Jay Peters, for a morning of pushing aircraft in and out of the hangar, posing for photographs and giving interviews, just to fit in with this writer’s unhelpful schedule.

CAC/IAA had recently added six Piper single-engine, glass-cockpit trainers to its fleet and Chris was keen to talk about the potential offered by the new acquisitions.

For many years, Canterbury Aero Club has had a strong focus on advanced and professional flight training. Unlike a number of similar organisations, it has also managed to retain and support a large and extremely loyal membership of active pilots and enthusiasts. The creation of the International Aviation Academy as an integral part of the organisation has resulted in a two-tier structure that caters very well to both the general membership and the large numbers of professional aviation students who choose to train and study with CAC/IAA.

Chris English’s arrival at Canterbury Aero Club is almost a Cinderella story. While serving as CEO of Canterbury Education Services, he decided to introduce his son to flying. In the process, he says that during his occasional visits to the club, he would sit and look at the then CEO, thinking how great it would be to have that job himself.

Coincidentally, shortly thereafter, just when Chris was feeling ready for a change of direction, he was browsing through classified employment advertisements and saw the Aero Club CEO’s position advertised and applied immediately. He has since found the job to be everything he expected, offering change, challenge and more.

He takes a very broad view of the operation and recognised early on that, in the competitive industry of professional flight training, it was important to offer a premier and streamlined product to cater to a finite and discriminating customer base.

The availability of the glass-cockpit fleet is now one of the prime drivers of the CAC/IAA marketing campaign and English sees it as a huge draw-card for new clients looking to select the best training venue from which to launch an airline career. As Jay Peters points out, most clubs and training organisations are sitting on aging fleets that are frequently already thirty years old. In a conscious effort to position the organisation as a progressive, modern business at the forefront of what Jay describes as the “rapidly changing face of aviation”, the decision was taken to move to a brand new fleet of glass-cockpit trainers.

The reasoning behind the bold move was that 99 percent of Academy students are targeting airline careers, so it would be an incredibly attractive proposition for them to be able to training using similar technology to that which they will encounter in the airline world. The new trainers are sufficiently advanced that, apart from the autopilot system, the avionics equipment and layout that students are exposed to is similar to that now fitted to the majority of new commercial aircraft.

Such technology doesn’t come cheap, however. The list price of a brand new glass-cockpit Archer is around NZ$600,000 landed in New Zealand. Even the less costly Warrior still comes in at a wallet-denting NZ$500,000. Here is where Chris displayed valuable astuteness and foresight by ensuring that the club had forward exchange cover for the purchases at the rate of US$0.71c. That meant that the club landed its three Archers and three Warriors for “only” NZ$400,000 or NZ$350,000 each—avoiding nearly half a million NZ dollars in price inflation from the plummeting exchange rate.

The first of the new aircraft arrived around eighteen months ago, and the most recent, in January 2009, and the club still has plans for further fleet modernisation. The Warriors are used for basic training, while the Archers carry out high-end training such as IF, GPS endorsement removal and cross-country work. Apart from the six new machines, Canterbury’s fleet includes one Archer, three Warriors, eight Cherokees, nine Tomahawks, one Arrow, one Seneca, a Piper Cub and three Partenavias, so there is plenty of scope for future plans.

Chris stresses that he wants to see a continual upgrading of the aging Cherokee fleet and, providing the financial situation is favourable, has the next glass-cockpit purchase cycle programmed for 2010. He points out that the substantially reduced maintenance costs of a new aircraft with solid-state avionics helps offset the purchase price when utilisation is high. And high it certainly is. Last financial year, the club recorded its busiest year ever, with the total of 27,600 hours being a massive 5,500 hours more than the next best year. The Cherokee 140 fleet is doing more than 1,000 hours per aircraft each year and, as Chris comments with a smile, “That level of utilisation certainly helps to pay for the new aircraft!”

In addition to the new aircraft, the club has also introduced a new electronic scheduling programme. The computer-based programme is available online, facilitating a huge leap in both efficiency and ease of use. Members and students are able to access the schedule online and make email bookings easily, while the flight office sports a huge electronic screen, replacing the traditional booking-sheet. This displays the continually-updated schedule in real-time up to two weeks ahead, although Chris sees extending it to a month in advance as the optimal setup.

Chris says he has already observed a huge increase in productivity since the system’s introduction, which has also seen the introduction of a single full-time staff position for a scheduler. “It offers real flexibility for both the club members and the academy students,” says Jay Peters.

The only challenge that has arisen from the introduction of glass-cockpits is a resistance to the new technology by existing pilots and members who can feel somewhat intimidated, but the club is working through that with the introduction of regular theory courses, which are well attended by members. Chris reports that after being introduced to the new machines, the members rapidly become “converts”. “We’ve found that once the members start flying and using the glass technology, they absolutely love it,” he says.

CAC/IAA can now easily claim to be one of the biggest flight-training organisations in Australasia. Chris recently visited Oxford Aviation Academy, and came away very happy with how Canterbury’s facilities, staff and fleet stacked up favourably against the biggest school in Australia.

Canterbury employs around fifty full-time staff, with about twenty-five of those being instructors—only a handful of whom are C-category instructors. With four full-time A-cats and the remainder experienced B-cats, CAC/IAA has a wealth of talent to offer its students and members.

Jay Peters has been the CFI for the last eleven of his nineteen years with the club and is the longest serving CFI in the club’s history. The pairing of Peters and English obviously works extremely well, both men being extremely enthusiastic about the direction the club is taking. Like many pilots, Chris flew as a younger man and then drifted away from flying as the demands of career and family took over. He is enjoying his return to aviation and also continues to enjoy a passion for motorcycling, which he shares with Jay. The two occasionally ride together, Chris on his Ducati and Jay on his Triumph, but the fact that they were willing to sacrifice a perfect public holiday to fit in with the Pacific Wings’ schedule says a great deal about the level of commitment they both have for the advancement of the club and academy.

It is refreshing to see an organisation prepared to spend such large amounts of money at a time when less visionary operators see only doom and gloom. It is even better to see an organisation happy after the event and planning to continue on a path that should place it at the very forefront of its industry.