CPPP flight instructors are among the most experienced Cirrus instructors. Most are Platinum CSIPs. COPA values their participation in these CPPP events.
Generally, we need one flight instructor for two flight participants plus instructors to handle ground courses.
Flight Group Mapper Process
This is the dreaded Friday afternoon process of assigning ground and flight instructors. There are way too many factors to list in this wiki article, but here is some of the background that would help a tutorial with an expert (Rick Beach).
The spreadsheet Flight Group Mapper.xlsx contains three worksheets:
- Regonline Data -- a copy of the data exported from Regonline by the report Flight Group Data; note that non-sim events need to have two columns added, columns K & L, inserted before AC Type (things need to line up for links to work)
- Flight Group Assignments -- a multi-purpose worksheet to attempt to assign ground course selections to each flight participants (note that ground participants can choose any course they want, but flight participants are flying half of the time so we try hard to accommodate their requests).
- Assignment Handout -- a single page with the assignment of flight participants to each instructor, which is manually copied from the Flight Group Assignments worksheet.
Recall that we split the flight participants into two flight groups A and B.
- Flight Group A schedule: plenary ground session Saturday morning, fly at noon Saturday, ground session at 3pm Saturday, fly at 8:30am Sunday, ground session at 3pm Sunday, depart 3pm Sunday
- Flight Group B schedule: plenary ground session Saturday morning, ground
session at noon Saturday, fly at 3pm Saturday, ground
session at 8:30am Sunday, fly at 3pm Sunday, depart 3pm Sunday
- Ground participant schedule: plenary ground session Saturday morning, ground
session at noon Saturday, ground session at 3pm Saturday, ground
session at 8:30am Sunday, ground session at 3pm Sunday, depart 3pm Sunday
Some courses have special scheduling preferences:
- Aviation Survival, taught by Doug Ritter, Equipped to Survive Foundation: prefer to schedule noon Saturday to accommodate partners from the Partner in Command course in the morning; this has worked out very well in expanding the coverage and often results in the partners cajoling the pilots to invest in better survival planning and equipment
- Single Pilot Resource Management or more recently Risk Management, taught by Cliff Izer: prefer to schedule this as two sessions on Sunday morning, which serves as a culmination of the weekend ground sessions
- Advanced Avionics and/or Garmin FMS: both deal with practical use of the navigation in Cirrus aircraft, and might be considered a sequence, especially for those new to the Avidyne & Garmin 430/430W avionics suite; Cirrus Perspective owners will only be satisified with the Garmin FMS course; COPA does not have an Avidyne R9 avionics module at present
- Weather courses: Weather Basics, Pre-flight Weather Strategies, In-flight Weather Tactics: we have a surfeit of course material for one weekend and often decide the course choices based on instructors, usually Jerry Seckler and Bill Frank. Generally I like to schedule a full compliment of weather courses in the four available slots, and sometimes leave it to the presenters to decide in real-time what their audience prefers.
Here's a brief on my thought process for using the mapper worksheet:
- Arrange to get the Regonline data with the two extra sim columns as well as sorted by last name A-Z
- Update the instructor names on the assignment handout worksheet
- Check out the mapper worksheet, looking that it has linked to each flight participant, that all participants are included, that the course preferences look reasonable, that the Flt A/Flt B columns look reasonable (meaning that they all have an amazing long formula to put an OK in the column if their preferences can be met, thanks to Bob Price for the Excel magic!), and the Inst column is blank
- Fill in the course schedule with any pre-determined course offerings, such as Surv on Saturday noon if Doug will be present
- Begin scheduling ground courses to see if you can increase the number of OK flags in Flt A/Flt B columns -- goal is to have an OK in either flight group column for each flight participant and the count of Not OK be zero
Success is zero under the Not OK formula.
Update the assignment handout table with slots when the flight instructors are committed to presenting a ground course.
Then begin assigning