You Can Fire Your CFI

The pairing with an instructor is a business relationship. Before considering cutting ties with them, explore why the relationship isn't working.

Meg Godlewski

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 11:08 AM ET

Verified

To figure out the best approach for your training, your CFI needs to know a little bit about you. [Credit: Adobe Stock]

Key Takeaways:

Pilots often continue with unsuitable flight instructors due to random initial pairings and unawareness that they can, and should, change instructors if the relationship isn't working.
Common reasons for a poor instructor-learner fit include uncommunicated expectations, conflicting learning and teaching styles, or personal biases such as age or gender.
It's important to professionally terminate an unsatisfactory instructional relationship, as it's a business interaction; instructors can also "fire" students who are disrespectful or fail to follow critical instructions.

See a mistake? Contact us.

“I wish I had known you could fire your flight instructor.”

This is a common refrain when pilots compare training experiences. Just as most of us have had a bad date, pretty much every pilot has had bad instructional experience. Maybe the certified flight instructor (CFI) was chronically late. Or yelled. Or didn’t say anything. Or needed the manly deodorant soap. Or was more interested in his or her gaining hours than teaching you. In short, something just didn’t work in the instructor/learner relationship, and you realized after the fact—sometimes a very long time, even years and hundreds of dollars later—that you should have terminated that instructional relationship and flown with someone else.