BeechCowboy48 said:
I worked there for a few years; like any gig there are good pts and bad ones. Keeping a 141 syllabus for 12 students was a bit of a pain in the arse, but I did fly enough to pay bills which doesn't always happen in the CFI world. ME time was hard to build unless you were there a while, and there were a bunch of unnescessary administrative hassles working there, but it was a good first flying job for me at least. The airplanes were in great shape and IFR was cake (no ice, no mountains.) A few afternoon boomers but nothing crazy. Cost of living is relativly cheap. Like most other jobs in FL it doesn't pay as much, but livin' is easier. I made about 8$ an hour when I started there and I think like 10-11 when I quit, but they gave me health care when I went full time. I guess they took away the health plan and upped the hourly. Good luck to anyone that works there, there are alot of worse places to be. I think the worst part about FIT was all the chubby girls that thought they were hot because of all the dudes that payed atention to them. Maybe I should have gone to UF......
Sounds pretty simular to when I was there, (Started at the BCC outpost in 97, moved to the main Melbourne campus 98 until I left for Great Lakes in 99.)
A lot of flight hours, you made your own schedule each day as long as your students were taken care of (I guess that went away from what I heard after I left.) Still turned into a 6 day a week job until the last few weeks when it was a 7 day a week job before and during final week. Students were provided and you just flew, leaving any financial considerations out of your planning, as the student could run a tab if add time was needed. You did have to stick around a while to get multi time, many people would rent some block time in "vintage" twins out of some of the nearby airports, get their 100 hours, and buy a job with Comair or ASA rather than wait to be senior enough to be assigned multi students and build the multi time that way.
Planes were in top shape, although well used, but they were starting a refurb program right before I left. Some of the things they were planning on doing was getting GPS in the IFR Cadets, new paint on all the planes, selling the Grumman Tigers off, selling the turbo Seminoles and getting a new normally asperated Semoinole, refurbing the other two normal asperated Seminoles they had.
When I was a student in the contact program (2 month Private Pilot school) in 1992 they didn't even have intercoms installed in the planes, some of the instructors had portable ones that ran on 9v batteries. I think they installed the intercoms in 1994 if I remember correctly.
FIT also had a charter program, VFR 135 in the Mooney 20J's and IFR in a Piper Chieftain. FIT started training me for the program 3 times, but each time the chief pilot they were training got hired somewhere else, and they would suspend all the charter training until they could hire another one, who would also leave for a job with more pay during training.
Other programs was a contract with AT&T to patrol some undersea cables in a Seminole, a program with NASA to fly in the restricted area during space shuttle launches and act as a relay for some UHF signals, and some early work with Harris Corp into technology that is now being developed in the Capstone program.
Pay was pretty low, even for a full time instructor and also as a senior flight instructor at FIT. Medical, Dental, Vision was available only to the full time instructors, and it was pretty expensive from what I remember, but at least it was something. After Embry-Riddle unionized their was some effort to have the same union come in amd represent FIT's instructors, I was gone by then but I heard from people the general increased the pay so the pilot group voted no to becoming union.
I don't think I took much if any of a pay cut when I went to Great Lakes for 14K a year as an FO, after being a full time instructor, flight training manager, and check airman at FIT.
A good amount of politics occured between campus and the flight line, and between the School of Aero and the University. Chief Instructors would last around 2 to 4 years before leaving, on average, If I am remembering correctly. Didn't affect the flight instructors too much as long as you kept out of the line of fire and did you job.
One good advantage is that you mostly teach college students who study, have taken or are taking formal college level ground school classes, want to fly at least 3 lessons a week, and come prepaired for their lessons for the most part. Your job is to get them throught the course, and don't have to worry about doing intro flights, finding your own students, having all your students only be willing to fly on weekends, having students stop because of money, and all the other hastles that an independent flight instructor deals with every day.
