School’s in

Paul Sallach, President of All In Aviation, a Cirrus Platinum Training Centre, talks to Anthony Harrington about combining pilot training with aircraft sales

AH: How did you come to be in aviation, Paul???

PS: I went to the University of North Dakota, a highly regarded aviation school, with the aim of becoming an airline pilot. I chose that career because I did not want to find myself in an office job. And here I am, 20 years later, with an office job and 21 employees.

My day job is all about managing flight instructors and coordinating sales. However, I try to spend a lot of my time selling aircraft and I now have people to help me run the flight school, manage our hangars, and liaise with tenants.

As to how all this came about, I originally worked as an instructor pilot for Cirrus Aircraft, for new aircraft owners. That job evolved into acting as a demo pilot for new prospects and developing a sales support role. That in turn led me to the path that I am now on. We teach people how to fly Cirrus SF50 jets and SR22 piston aircraft, and I sell prospective owners new and pre-owned Cirrus Aircraft.

AH: The hangar part of things is probably the least exciting and the most stable part of your business revenue stream is it not?

PS: We built 26 hangars at Henderson Executive Airport. One of these is our maintenance hangar, with 9,000 square feet of office space, which houses our flight school. The others are all storage hangars for our tenants, plus some bigger box hangars for mid-size business jets.?That amounts to some five acres of real estate space.

It generates a very steady income so long as tenants are paying their rent. It was a great help to us through the pandemic and the lockdowns. We received our certificate of occupancy in April 2020, just as COVID really started to bite. We were concerned at first that the pandemic would mean people wouldn’t show up to take rental space. In fact, people have been buying aircraft like crazy and they need somewhere to store them, so that has played well for us. With the hangars, we are literally just the landlord. We give them the keys and they come and go as they please.

Basically, in normal times we run the hangars as a break-even operation. We need office space to run our operating companies out of, and so we now have this at no cost to ourselves.

AH: Do you want to build more hangars and office space?

PS: Absolutely. This particular airport is in the middle of an FAA master planning session. So we have to wait for the FAA to come up with its projection of what will happen in the future. Then they will grant land releases that are in accordance with the master plan. I am hopeful we can get a very reasonable chunk of that. We are tenants in good standing as far as the County is concerned, so I am hopeful they will look favorably on any application we make. The land, of course, is owned by the County.

AH: How severely did COVID affect your operations?

PS: Initially with COVID, no one knew what to expect. The airport was a ghost town with everyone locked up in their houses. However, personal travel was one of the first activities to come out of the weeds, and I began hiring flight instructors right in the middle of the pandemic.

What we saw were people who had always wanted to learn to fly but who never had the time. Now they had nothing but time on their hands so they could get started on that long held ambition. We saw a surge in demand for aircraft rentals and flight instructors. I now have seven full time flight instructors. In addition, we have three admin staff and five between our retail pilot shop and line-service for our flight school. We clean the aircraft for the owners, it is pulled onto the ramp for them and everything is ready to go.

AH: How do you allocate flight times for lessons?

PS: The actual in-the-air time for most pupils is probably just over an hour, but this typically involves a three-hour block, with pre-flight planning and a debrief after the flight. The lessons learned in the air are worked through on the ground. We use eleven Cirrus aircraft in our operation and a couple of Cessnas to provide a lower, entry-level price point for folks.

AH: Of course, there is a tremendous synergy between teaching people to fly and selling them relatively low cost aircraft (by comparison with a mid-range business jet, for example).

PS: Absolutely, every client we teach is a great potential future buyer. And of course, we work very closely with Cirrus itself. I was only recently at the factory, holding several meetings with them. One of their senior people mentioned that they only wished that every flight school made the investment in their aircraft that we have made. That wasn’t just a chance remark. Cirrus awarded us the title of Training Centre the Year for 2020, which was tremendous for us.

Read the full article here: https://issuu.com/bizavmedia/docs/bam018_summer_2021/20?fr=sNTJmMTI3NzQ1NDc