Choosing the CFI Route

While flight instructing is not for everyone, there are major advantages while on the journey to becoming a professional pilot.

Sam Weigel

Friday, May 05, 2023 at 04:23 PM ET

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While flight instructing is not for everyone, there are major advantages while on the journey to becoming a professional pilot. [File Photo: Adobe Stock]

Key Takeaways:

The article challenges the common perception that flight instructing is a last-resort method for building flight hours, arguing it offers significant, often overlooked, advantages.
Key benefits of flight instructing include its widespread availability, quick entry into the job market for low-hour pilots, portability, and the potential for a highly rewarding and engaging teaching experience.
Despite acknowledging typical downsides like pay and hours, the author emphasizes that these are common to entry-level jobs and that teaching itself is not overly difficult or boring, requiring basic communication and empathy.

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In my previous installment of V1 Rotate, I noted some of the reasons that a fledgling professional pilot might choose not to flight instruct, and listed a number of alternate means of time-building. Most of those alternative jobs, however, have their own downsides in terms of pay, safety, being VFR-only, only being available in certain areas, or being tough to break into.

I noted that the well-connected candidate with geographic flexibility is likely to have the most choice in how they get to 1,000 hours and beyond. The unspoken implication, which I most certainly did not intend, is that awkward homebodies might have to resign themselves to flight instructing after all.