The people who run a flight school
A profile is the kind of organisation you are — a club, a DTO, an ATO. A persona is the job you do inside one. A Head of Training exists at a DTO, an ATO and an academy; an instructor exists everywhere. Each role below shows what is hard about the job today, and the operating profiles it appears in.
Head of Training
Owns the training standard
Owning the standard and the progression of every student while the evidence for it lives in six people’s spreadsheets.
Operations Manager
Runs the day
Making the day work when a snag, a sick instructor or a weather call invalidates half the board and nothing tells you what moved.
Chief Flying Instructor
Owns who flies what
Holding responsibility for who is signed off to fly what, with privileges and currency tracked on paper and in memory.
Accountable Manager / Director
Carries the accountability
Carrying the regulatory and commercial accountability for the organisation without a single trustworthy view of its state.
Safety & Compliance Manager
Runs safety & the audit trail
Running reporting, risk and the audit trail as a continuous function, not a fortnight of reconstruction before an inspection.
Maintenance Controller
Keeps the fleet legal
Keeping the fleet legal and available when the schedule books aircraft that maintenance already knows are about to go out of hours.
Instructor
Teaches and signs off
Publishing availability, closing records and signing off lessons between flights, on a phone, without a desk or a laptop.
Student
Learning to fly
Knowing what is booked, what is next in the syllabus, and whether today’s lesson is actually going ahead.