Right Hand Seat – CPL ATO qualifications

And how does one become an ATO (Approved Test Officer)? If the CASA requirements are applied to the letter it would appear that becoming an ATO to test commercial candidates is becoming harder, very much harder.

In the flying training game the end product of an instructor’s instructional work needs to be checked by another party to ensure that they meet the requirements of the regulator. CASA Test Officers can do the job but there is quite a fee as CASA charges for time, travel, accommodation and the test fee. CASA delegated ATOs can also do the subject testing both for an initial issue or a rating renewal.

And what are the requirements and qualifications of an ATO? From a recently sighted CASA qualifications and application document comes the following.

For the GFPT, PPL and NVFR level the basic requirements the applicant must have are at least 1500 hours flight time, have qualifications equivalent to those of a CFI of a VFR flight school and have held a grade 1 instructor rating for 1 year immediately preceding the application.

For the commercial licence ATO the basic requirements that the applicant must have are; Hold a current grade 1 instructors rating. Have held a grade1 flight instructors rating for at least 3 years immediately preceding the application. Have experience in conducting flight tests for the GFPT, PPL and NVFR. Have at least 2000 hours total flight time. Then comes the interesting one. Have conducted at least 100 hours of flight instruction for the commercial licence, in accordance with the Day VFR Syllabus, in the previous 12 months, plus have 500 hours conducting training for the commercial pilot licence in post PPL sequences, in accordance with the Day VFR Syllabus, in the last five years. Another requirement is to have at least 250 hours in commercial operations other than flying training.

Until recently one of the requirements for a Chief Flying Instructor’s position was 500 hours commercial experience but this was lowered to 250 on industry request when it became apparent that otherwise qualified applicants were coming up short of the 500 hour requirement. If the applicant had 500 hours of commercial time why would he/she want to become a CFI?

The requirements for the Command Instrument Rating, the Flight Instructor Rating, the Multi-engine Training Approval and the Instrument Rating Training Approval are on the ATO application document but are not covered in this article.

We can say that the requirements for the GFPT, PPL and NVFR ATO applicant are reasonable and attainable. The commercial pilot licence ATO application is harder to understand. Now we know that CASA is devoting more attention to try and raise the level of commercial pilot skills and in part this comes about by asking a higher standard of the CPL ATO applicant.

In doing so the question has to be asked are the requirements too high?

To log 100 hours of flight time on CPL training in a year means that for every flight hour logged the instructor should have spent some 3-4 hours of ground instruction and briefing and de-briefing the CPL candidate. A lot of time. And that is assuming that there is a constant flow of CPL candidates to train to be tested, something not always possible. Now if the said ATO applicant is also to train other student levels and conduct flight tests for the GFPT, PPL and NVFR there is not much time left in twelve months. Training and testing for the NVFR can be a really time consuming exercise as noted in this column in the July 2010 AA.

Then we have to look at the second requirement of interest, to have spent 500 hours in CPL training over the past last five years. That is a lot of very dedicated and time consuming flight and ground instruction. The stuff of a sausage factory.

If we look at the amount of time that the budding CPL ATO should have spent directly training CPL candidates that does not leave much time to be involved in other areas of training including instructor and instrument training or the ability to stand back and see how the whole operation is running and complying with the requirements plus the mentoring of grade three and grade two instructors. Then there are the people problems that come with flight training when dealing directly with students, the customers. That senior pilot or CFI should be spending more time managing the training operation rather than running around applying bandaids to problems. Better to plan ahead and not have problems.

In flight training the aim is to achieve high standards but that should not come at the expense of not having enough ATOs to check the required standards.

Could it be that the bar has been set too high?

Contact Dave by email at [email protected]