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Death by Time Builder

Commentary: A fatal flight in Kentucky last week—involving a CFI using Snapchat to demean a young student pilot—was entirely preventable.

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Key Takeaways:

  • The article distinguishes between professional flight instructors, experience builders, and "time builders," criticizing the latter for prioritizing hour accumulation over effective teaching, which contributes to rote learning and high student checkride failure rates.
  • It details a fatal crash involving a "time builder" instructor who exhibited extreme unprofessionalism by publicly shaming his student on social media and proceeding with a flight into severe weather, highlighting a catastrophic failure in judgment and responsibility.
  • The incident serves as a critical case study underscoring the paramount importance of flight instructor professionalism, adherence to safety protocols, mature decision-making, and constructive communication, emphasizing that the role demands more than just building flight hours.
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What do time builders, experience builders, and flight instructors have in common? They all work at flight schools, but only two of them can teach you how to fly. Flight instructors have chosen to make teaching people to fly their career. Experience builders are teaching people to fly and building their own hours for other aviation jobs. Flight instructors and experience builders are more likely to use a syllabus and airman certification standards from day one.

Time builders are the flight instructors who, although they hold an instructor certificate, are focused on building their hours, not teaching. They may not know how to teach beyond the test because that’s how they were trained. This is particularly common if they went through an accelerated program where the focus is get ’em, get ’em out.

Meg Godlewski

Meg Godlewski has been an aviation journalist for more than 24 years and a CFI for more than 20 years. If she is not flying or teaching aviation, she is writing about it. Meg is a founding member of the Pilot Proficiency Center at EAA AirVenture and excels at the application of simulation technology to flatten the learning curve. Follow Meg on Twitter @2Lewski.

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