Waiting, waiting, wating....

I read on the newspaper last week that Florida is packed with foreign student pilots. Mostly people from India and China, consequence of the big-aviation-boom in those countries in Southeast Asia, are streaming to the sunshine-state skies to earn their wings and then go back home.
Add that to the fact that the US dollar have never been so low in the whole world.... What a perfect combination for wannabe pilots.

Well so far it looks like good news right? The local economy enjoys this grow as well: student pilots fill restaurants, go to clubs, buy laptops, rent apartments, even buy cars. Needless to say about flight school owners, popping their champagnes after every new aircraft that joins the expanding fleet. However, that's bad news to us pilots! We wait between flights, more planes are grounded, all instructors are busy as hell, lack of airplanes, lots of cancellations and the list goes on. Not to mention the mess in the skies, the sharp watch out for traffic, the endless waiting on the hold short line before take-off, the numbers in the hobbs rolling in the ground while your heart burns as you feel your money burning too...

Yeah it's been a pain. Also for all part 141 students, we have a lot of stage checks - those are mini-checkrides inside the school, after every stage of your course. And what happens is that the average waiting time between your last training flight and a stage check is about a week, so imagine what happens when you do your instrument rating where you have 3 stage checks and one final checkride. That's about 4 weeks of waiting, doing nothing. Students are getting bored and desperated.

I didn't mention the paperwork between courses... It's also about a week of waiting after you finish one course/rating and want to start a new one. You need to get your temporary license, and it passes trough about 7 different people to check it and sign it, so in average one person a day can check it because "everyone is so busy in school" and then.... hell!

Until when??