Learning about Learning to Fly in Seattle

I had a great discussion today with Jeremy Wilson (that’s him in the bomber jacket on the right, with a fellow named Barrington Irving), from Seattle’s Galvin Flying. I reached out to Galvin, because we noticed that a lot of searches were being made in the ‘Learn to Fly / Seattle Flying School‘ arena and also because my wife bought me an introductory flying class at Galvin several years ago. The number of searches made us wonder, “Will people want to use TeachStreet to find flying schools and teachers, and will those schools be interested in participating with TeachStreet?”

I asked Jeremy first for an overview of Galvin’s flying operations. He told me that they’re actually more than just a flying school — in fact, as a Fixed Base Operation, they not only train future pilots, but also fuel and maintain many aircraft of all types, from private smaller planes to large public aircraft.

He also told me that they were significantly different from many traditional flight schools, since most people go to those schools and learn on decades-old Cessnas. Galvin’s management made the decision to invest in state-of-the-art 21st century aircraft, including new technology aircraft such as those from Diamond , which are a tremendous draw for the more serious flight students. From a cost perspective, this is a big deal — an older Cessna may represent a $40,000 investment for a flight school, whereas a Diamond will likely start at $400,000! Jeremy’s boss, Nick Frisch (he’s the Director of Flight Training) has also made the push for more investment in simulation technologies, and they’re really starting to see that pay off, with more students interested in even higher-level training (i.e. instead of training to fly a Cessna, students are jumping right to ‘Right Seat Training for Boeing 747s’.

He told me that they primarily see 3 types of pilots:

1. Younger students, who have a goal to work for airlines (as a side note, there is a huge need/career opportunity for airline pilots right now)
2. Older, successful business professionals, who are into their ‘golden years’, who have a goal to purchase a plane, learn to fly it, and sometimes to even lease the plane back to Galvin to use for other training
3. Early retirees from the many technology companies in the Pacific Northwest; their goals are varied, but many look to become certified and then even teach for Galvin

Regarding how they find most students, they find that most of the 3rd group come from word of mouth with some online research on top of it (since many of these types have been groomed on the Internet, these are their first, second and third instincts!) However, they find most of the 1st and 2nd groups coming primarily from a mix of online-only sources, including general search engine queries, which lead them ultimately to the Galvin Flying website (Jeremy’s put a lot of effort into making the site more findable by the major search engines). While Jeremy has a list a mile long of things he’d like to improve about their site, he’s found that most students really appreciate the information on different airplanes and the depth of content they’ve made available.

Over the years, he’s made the decision to spend less on traditional advertising sources (yellow pages, print, radio), and instead has listened to his customers, who repeatedly told him they were doing their research online before seeking him out. He has used aggregation sites (similar to what TeachStreet will be doing, in some ways), but wishes that the aggregators did a better job of sending him qualified students, specifically:

• enable the students to see his website URL, so they can do research before contacting them directly
• communicate the actual cost of learning to fly a plane (it isn’t cheap — in fact, it can run to more than $50,000! It’s important to let potential students know that, to appropriately set expectations)
• give them the freedom to describe their business, specialties and other information in their own words — templates are nice for customers, but the amount of information will be different for different subjects

Jeremy closed by wishing us luck and telling us that at the end of the day, if we can help them do an even better job of finding qualified customers/leads and obtain even better class placements in search engines, that it would likely be something they’d be interested in, because there really isn’t a similar alternative for them right now.

Thanks, Jeremy — we appreciate the input and are doing our pre-flight web-site check now!

p.s. I found this Galvin Flying Video on YouTube — it’s a 6-minute Flight Lesson from Galvin — hope it gets your juices flowing to go take a flight lesson!