Get to know FlyOz

Gray started flying privately in 1995, while maintaining her regular job as a school teacher, and says she fell into working as a full-time professional pilot simply “by accident’. From aircraft ferrying, to charter, to instructing, Gray has seen a little bit of everything and recently took home Flight Instructor of the Year at the 2018 Royal Aeronautical Society awards.

Congratulations on your accolade! To start with, can you tell me a little bit about Fly Oz, and what you’ve achieved in the years since opening your doors?

We train student pilots from ab initio through to commercial pilot licences; multi-engine ratings; instrument ratings; and so on. We also tend to focus a lot on instructor ratings, as well as upgrades for someone who has got a qualification and just wants to add to it or to keep current. We have two examiners servicing us here, so we can do a lot of in-house examining. Based in Cowra, our location here is terrific, it’s a great town, the airport is wonderful, and the council is really supportive of all the things that happen at the airport. The climate here is perfect for teaching people to fly, as we have perhaps 340 flyable days per year if not more! We’re close to controlled airspace, so we can train our students in that. It’s not far from Canberra, Bankstown or Richmond. It really is just a top spot. Since starting seven years ago, we’ve now grown to employ nine instructors, and just recently in 2019 Fly Oz won Business of the Year in Cowra.

The key theme of 2020 is, unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic. How did that impact your business, and what does ‘the new normal’ look like for you now?

We definitely slowed down a little in the beginning, as we do a lot of instructor upgrade work and a lot of that is sent our way from interstate, particularly Victoria. Despite that, we’ve navigated the pandemic fairly well. We kept all of our staff on the books and we still have our head above water, so I think despite the challenges we’ve ended up with a good outcome. Like many workplaces, we did have to trim things back a little bit to make it work under the new circumstances, especially because for us, it was a priority to keep all of our team here. So, we did just fine. And that’s helped by the fact that we’re a flight school and we’re based in New South Wales; so we weren’t affected by a lack of passengers like the airlines, or the severe lockdown that poor Victorians had to wade through – we were able to just continue our work. At the moment, things appear to be improving around the country, so I think we’ll see some more certainty soon, as will everyone.

As someone with decades of experience, and who works with the industry’s future pilots every day, do you have any insight or advice for an up-and-coming pilot who might be feeling a little disheartened at the moment?

Being an island continent and being so big and vast, the Australian domestic and regional airline industry is pretty solid. It’s already back up and running, albeit not yet at full capacity, but it is getting there, and it’s far closer than many sectors around the world. I think that Australia has a domestic career base that other countries just don’t have. The size of our country is a big advantage to getting people going again and working again. And once domestic borders all open up, which they’re slowly doing, people will definitely want to travel domestically. They’ll want to get away for Christmas, or the summer holidays, or whatever it may be. And they can’t go anywhere else.

So there’s the domestic airline work, then there’s also charter work. We’ve seen a bit of a boom in charter demand since the pandemic hit, because there’s fewer domestic flights but people still want and need to get around. Some people also use charter as a way to avoid coming in contact with a lot of people as they would when travelling through a busy airport or sitting on a passenger plane. In terms of international flight capacity, we’ve actually seen this before. We had a similar thing happen when the GFC hit, everybody stopped flying and businesses worked out that they could do conferences online or via telephone. But then, as soon as the GFC was over, that demand came back almost immediately. Considering that we’re getting closer and closer to a vaccine that could very well see the end of COVID; this could all mean that now is a good time to start learning how to fly. Because it takes you probably two years to get all your qualifications and by then, things should be starting back up again.

Considering how well you’ve managed to navigate this challenging environment, what’s next on the cards for Fly Oz?

Currently we’re developing a number of ‘job ready’ programs, particularly with charter growth in mind. That might look like putting instructors with a multi-engine instrument rating into aircraft that gives them a better footing in the industry. A lot of charter companies would use a Baron or a Cessna Caravan, so giving them experience in these aircraft will make them more desirable as a candidate. On top of that, and in understanding that flight training is an expensive task, we’re now offering interest-free repayments on some of our courses to try and help people through. We’re now in a position where we can afford to carry the first part of that cost, and it makes a huge difference to the people on those courses. It just gives people that opportunity even if they can’t afford to pay it all upfront. So that’s something that certainly appeals to us and we’re certainly working on it. We’re always on the lookout on what we can do to make the experience here better.