Two of the biggest growth levers for your flight school are sitting in plain sight, and most operators are ignoring both of them.
When flight school owners ask me where they should be focusing their growth energy in 2026, two answers keep coming up that rarely make the shortlist: home flight simulators and serious digital marketing. Not because these are trending, but because the schools quietly running on both are pulling ahead of the ones that are not.
That is exactly why we are sitting down with Chris McGonegle from Sporty’s Pilot Shop on Tuesday, April 21.
Chris is the Director of Search Marketing at Sporty’s and the company’s resident flight simulator expert. He sits at an intersection you almost never see in one person. He runs paid search, SEO, and digital acquisition for the largest pilot retailer in the world, and he has spent years as Sporty’s Flight Simulation Product Manager working directly with Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane, Honeycomb Aeronautical, Logitech, and Infinite Flight. He is also a University of Cincinnati Aviation Technology Program graduate, a Commercial pilot with Instrument Rating, and a self-described rusty pilot who came back.
If you are a flight school owner trying to grow enrollment, retain students, or finally figure out where your marketing spend should go, you want to be in this conversation.
Why Chris McGonegle Is the Right Guest for Flight School Operators
Chris’s career at Sporty’s is unusual in the best way. He started in sales, left for three years, came back as New Product Manager, became the flight simulator category lead during the 2020 MSFS launch and the Honeycomb boom, and now runs Sporty’s paid acquisition across three brand verticals: aviation products, home goods, and aviation enthusiast gifts.
What that means in practice: Chris runs the kind of marketing tests most flight schools have never seen. Category-wide holdout experiments to measure what paid search is actually adding. New channel tests to find acquisition opportunities before they get expensive. PPC across product categories with completely different buyer psychologies. He is doing this inside a niche aviation vertical, which is exactly the environment your flight school operates in.
On the simulator side, Chris edits Flight Sim Update, Sporty’s dedicated flight sim content property, and has produced dozens of instructional videos, written guides, and webinars. He was the lead on Sporty’s integration with Infinite Flight’s Learn to Fly scenarios, the Honeycomb Bravo profiles that ship with every Bravo Throttle Sporty’s sells, and the Echo Aviation Controller launch earlier this year.
He is also a pilot with a story your students will recognize. It took Chris 1,721 days to earn his Commercial certificate. He then took a three-year hiatus from flying before returning to the left seat and documenting the whole experience in a four-part “rusty pilot” series on Flight Training Central. That is the authentic voice of the student your flight school lost last year and wishes you knew how to bring back.
What We Will Cover on the Live Recording
This conversation is going to be operator-focused throughout. A few of the threads Chris and I will be pulling on:
Home simulators as a flight school tool, not a toy. The home sim market has matured dramatically over the last five years. Chris will walk through how flight schools can actually use at-home simulation as a pre-lesson prep tool, a weather-day backup, a discovery flight alternative, and a retention mechanism for stage-gated students. If you have never thought about a $300 Logitech setup in your lobby as a marketing asset, this is your episode.
Search marketing in a niche aviation vertical. What actually moves the needle when you are running paid search in a category with low volume and high click costs. How to tell if your Google Ads spend is incremental or just cannibalizing organic traffic. Why most flight schools are overpaying on discovery flight keywords. What channels Chris is testing right now that most flight schools have not considered.
The rusty pilot playbook. Chris lived the exact return-to-flying journey that every flight school owner wants to solve. We will talk about what brought him back, what the resources were that made him feel ready, and what structured rusty pilot programs flight schools should be building to recover lapsed student lifetime value.
What Sporty’s learned from a model you can steal. Sporty’s runs a Part 141 flight school (Sporty’s Academy) that delivers all the flight training for the University of Cincinnati Clermont College Aviation Technology degree. Chris went through that program as a student and now works for the company that runs it. If your school is thinking about a college partnership, his perspective is rare.
The two-hat problem. Chris is one of very few people who has run a product category and the acquisition engine for that same category. That crossover shows up in how he thinks about marketing. We will dig into what operators and marketers each miss about each other, and how flight school owners should be closing that gap inside their own business.
Who This Episode Is For
You should join us live if:
You are a flight school owner or operator thinking about how to grow enrollment in a market where your competitors look roughly identical to you on paper.
You are running paid ads, SEO, or social media for your flight school and you are not sure if any of it is actually producing incremental students.
You have thought about adding flight simulators to your training program and do not know where to start, what to buy, or how to position them to students.
You lose too many students between discovery flights and first solo, or between private and instrument, and you are looking for the retention tools other schools are quietly using.
You want to hear how one of aviation’s most sophisticated retailers thinks about the pilot journey from curiosity through certification.
How to Join the Live Recording
When: Tuesday, April 21, 2026, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Central
Where: Riverside live studio
How it works: Click the link a few minutes before the recording starts. You will drop into the live studio session with Chris, myself, and the rest of the team. You can listen in the whole hour and stay engaged in the live chat. Questions from the audience get priority whenever we have time at the end.
This is a working recording session, not a polished broadcast. That is the point. You get to see the conversation unfold, jump in with questions, and walk away with tactical takeaways before the episode is even published.
Ready to Grow Your Flight School?
If the topics in this conversation sound like things you have been meaning to solve at your own school, you do not have to wait for the episode to drop to start working on them.
Schedule a free strategy call to walk through where your flight school’s growth is actually getting stuck and what to do about it: rightruddermarketing.com
Download our free Flight School Marketing Handbook for a full breakdown of the marketing systems that are working for operators right now: Download Here
And make sure to subscribe to The Aviation Business Podcast on YouTube and Spotify so you do not miss the episode when it drops.
See you Tuesday at 11 AM Central.
Tim Jedrek is the CEO and Founder of Right Rudder Marketing, the digital marketing agency specializing exclusively in flight school growth. A pilot and entrepreneur, Tim helps flight school owners across North America increase student enrollments and build sustainable, profitable businesses through strategic marketing.
Connect with us:
- YouTube: @rightruddermarketing
- LinkedIn: Right Rudder Marketing
- Spotify: The Aviation Business Podcast
Ready to be the best flight school in your area?
We are pilots too, and we know how to market flight schools. If you want to attract more students and grow your business, we can help. Schedule a free strategy call with us today to learn how we can help you achieve your goals.