[Peetwo]

Remember this?

Another couple for the Mick Mack aviation safety shitlist - 

Still catching up on this but from last week in the Oz:

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Pilot courses on hold during audit



Enrolments in aviation courses with Box Hill Institute are believed to be on hold as the TAFE college responds to an audit by the Australian Skills Quality Authority.

As The Australian revealed last week, 15 former students of Box Hill and Soar Aviation were seeking refunds of their VET loans because they were unhappy with the training they received. That figure has grown to 35 students, including 30 from Melbourne and five from Sydney.

It followed revelations more than 400 students were enrolled in two-year commercial pilots’ licence courses at Box Hill in 2018, which had received $11m in loan payments in return.

Department of Education figures showed only six people had graduated from the diploma course but Soar Aviation CEO Neel Khokhani said the figure was as high as 61. Box Hill CEO Vivienne King confirmed ASQA had audited aviation delivery at the institute and it was currently responding to the audit report as requested.

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Plus:

Flight training suspended at Soar Aviation

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And from the embuggerance & SBG threads:

Lead Balloon; Respect.

& 

GlenB embuggerance latest - 05/11/19: St Commode email account - WTD??

Eventually that did get sorted and the dodgy Soar operation is back up and running. However it would appear that unscrupulous pilot training providers unfortunately are not a rarity...

From Ironsider, via the Oz:

Easy entry to pilot courses under fire



Student pilot Amy Cavanough, 23 with her instructor Adrian Norman, director of Cleveland Bay Aviation. Picture: Cam Laird

EXCLUSIVE
ROBYN IRONSIDE
AVIATION WRITER
@ironsider

9:21PM DECEMBER 2, 2019
10 COMMENTS
Flight training schools taking on hundreds of prospective pilots have been urged to strengthen ­eligibility criteria so unsuitable students are not left with huge debts and little to show for it.

Gaining entry into commercial pilot licence courses funded by six-figure VET student loans can be as easy as an online test or a tertiary entrance score (ATAR) as low as 40.65.

Adrian Norman, of Cleveland Bay Aviation in Townsville, said easy access to funding meant a lot of young people were signing up for two-year courses with the ­expectation of landing a job with an airline. “To my mind, it is ­unconscionable to attract young people to a course where many will have little chance of meeting the academic and skills requirements to obtain a CPL, let alone meet the stringent psychographic profiling ­requirements for employment in the airlines, and then condemn them to a debt when they fail or drop out,” he said.


His concerns were shared by David Prossor, a flight instructor at Moorabbin, Melbourne.

“There should be a filter of some sort such that prospective commercial trainees are not up for big money to then find out that they are not suitable to be a pilot,” he said.

A former student of Box Hill Institute in Melbourne and Soar Aviation said the enrolment test could be completed at home and focused on basic English and simple algebra equations. On its website, Soar Aviation says its courses do not require a background in “physics or mathematics”. “We will teach you what you need to know to achieve a commercial pilot ­licence,” it says.

Box Hill and Soar were contacted by The Australian but did not respond.

Another student pilot who spent two years training at RMIT, said the eligibility criteria there consisted of an “exceptionally low” ATAR score of 40.65. “When I asked why is it so low, I was told, ‘because we want to ­attract people who really want to be pilots’,” he said.

An RMIT spokeswoman said the institute was committed to improving access to education.

“It is important to note that entry into this program is ­extremely competitive and after being accepted there is an ongoing requirement for students to be committed to full-time study and attend all courses,” she said.

According to Department of Employment data, CPL courses attracted the second-largest amount of VET student loans after nursing and the highest amount per enrolment. In the six months to June 30, there were 8643 people enrolled in diploma of nursing courses for which $25.8m worth of loans had been paid. In comparison, 814 people were enrolled in CPL courses funded almost entirely by $19.8m worth of VET loans.

A spokesman for Employment Minister Michaelia Cash said she wanted every VET student to have confidence their training provider would deliver training they needed to become job-ready.

Self-funded trainee pilot Amy Cavanough said persistence and dedication were the keys to success in aviation. “It’s not easy, but there is a great network of support available,” she said.

Senator Cash’s spokesman said: “Quality vocational training is critical to our economy and the government does not tolerate poor-quality training providers. Every training provider must meet strict requirements before they can deliver an approved course.”

 

MTF...P2