California Flight Schools & Instructors see new burden

I used to get recurrent and bi-annual sign-offs from independent CFI's I knew that mostly did it as a service for their local pilots. Continuing that practice could be very tough under this legislation.

 

The law of unintended consequences strikes again!

 

How can they justify the fees? Many of those agencies are self funding, maybe it is as simple as their need for additional funds to cover other shortfalls but Consumer Affairs is self funding too and they are not being greedy like that. I personally know of no other similar fee schedule being that high and I also know there just isn't that much money in flight training.

Going to really hurt an already crippled industry.

 

Choke the Golden Goose, with all of your effort.

 

It's all a result of the Silver State Helicopters scam-- there was pressure to "do something so this doesn't happen again," but as I posted above, the law of unintended consequences took over...

 

One of the reasons businesses are departing California. Too painful to do business there.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

You guys can say that crap all you like but the fact is the state fees charged for businesses just are not very high in California. In fact fees and fines charged by CA and CPA are usually laughably low here. I am in the second biggest industry in the state and they charge us $200 and that has been the same for at least fifteen years. Many states are much higher. The high costs of doing business here is real estate, insurance, unions and rules imposed upon us by the courts or the vote of the people. Items left up to state discretion are just not a problem. There is more to it and I am just asking Yin if he knows.

 

As Don says, the instigating cause seemed to be the Silver State debacle (not only did they collect tuition in advance, they apparently pulled all the student loan money out they could, then went TU).

But as far as the rationale for the fees, that's not clear. Some think that it's because BPE (Bureau of Post-secondary Education) has no experience with flight schools, others think it's a money grab to make up for shortfalls. I don't know any more than that.

http://www.generalaviationnews.com/?p=24410

Edit: I just went to the BPE website and their school application form shows a $5000 fee required to operate a non-accredited institution.

http://www.bppe.ca.gov/applications/approval_nonaccredited.pdf

Flight schools used to have an exemption, AB48 apparently eliminated that exemption. So it would seem that BPE is just fitting flight schools into their standard fee structure. (Note that accredited institutions only have to pay a $750 fee.)

What seems odd is why CFIs need to file as an institution, it doesn't seem like Spanish tutors, as an example, have to go through this.

 

I hope all the flight schools and CFIs from california move to Arizona and Nevada. It is an easy flight to get over there for your BFI and ICC checks. Of course I imagine the people's republic of california will next find a way to make having or using an aircraft prohibitively expensive or inconvenient so it may be a moot point. The scary thing is that we now have the same attitudes in the regime in D.C. so we may have to do all our flying and instructing in Canada or Mexico.