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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 highlights a critical issue with "time builder" flight instructors who prioritize accumulating flight hours over effective teaching, often leading to rote learning rather than real-world understanding and higher private pilot check ride failure rates.
  • A fatal crash in Kentucky involving a 22-year-old instructor and an 18-year-old student serves as a tragic case study, where the instructor publicly shamed the student on social media and continued the flight into severe weather.
  • This incident underscores a severe failure of professionalism, judgment, and the primary responsibility of a flight instructor to ensure flight safety, emphasizing the need for better communication and a focus on comprehensive learning in aviation training.
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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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