Flight Instructors

There are a few moments in life that are truly memorable. It might be the day you held your first driver’s license, a crazy party to celebrate your 21st birthday, your very first kiss or the birth of a child. For most pilots, the first flight lesson is an experience that will trigger the limbic […]

Learning to fly most any aircraft requires you to work one-on-one with a professional pilot called a certificated flight instructor—which refers to the FAA credentials that this person must hold. You may have worked closely with an instructor when you learned to drive, scuba dive, ride a horse or any number of similar activities, so […]

So you’ve started flight training, but it’s just not working the way you expected. You’ve got a sinking feeling that you and your flight instructor just aren’t communicating like you should—or you have a downright distaste for spending any time at all with this person who is serving as a primary mentor in your aviation […]

Aviation has always been a dream and interest in my life. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, not too far away from John F. Kennedy International Airport (KJFK). I used to wake up to airplanes screaming out of the airport every single morning as child before I got ready for school. One […]

The FAA and industry jointly grant a handful of awards for general aviation pursuits each year, and the GA Awards leadership recently announced those they have honored for 2021. The awards for National Flight Instructor, Aviation Technician, and FAASTeam Rep of the Year will be presented at EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July. The […]

The original Master Flight Instructor program began in 1997, thanks to instructors and retired school teachers Sandy and JoAnn Hill. The Master Instructor Continuing Education Program (MICEP), until recently managed as a stand-alone organization, is a family of accreditations available to qualified aviation educators based on a system of advanced professional standards and rigorous peer […]

The Hillsboro Aero Academy, an Oregon-based helicopter and airplane pilot training school, has launched a standalone CFI Completion Program that allows pilots who already hold a commercial pilot certificate to enroll in a CFI-Airplane, -Instrument or -Multiengine rating course. According to a Hillsboro news release, the academy launched the new program largely in response to […]

Flight instructors are required to renew their certificate every two years. CFIs with a specific number of successful checkride recommendations during the previous two years can however, renew based alone on that record—but that may not be possible in the current environment. Recently, the bottom has fallen out from underneath flight schools because of the […]

The stay-at-home and social-distancing orders associated with the COVID-19 outbreak that have been issued by many states and local municipalities have had a major impact on flight training providers, both short term and potentially long term. Flight training providers are feeling pressure from local and state authorities all around the country—so what is an instructor […]

If the basics of airmanship still apply in safely controlling an airplane—coordinated maneuvers, power-and-speed management, and situational awareness, for example—wouldn’t the methods to deliver those skills to new pilots remain anchored in fundamental truths as well? Redbird Flight Simulations launched in 2006 with the idea that this is not necessarily the case—and pursued development of […]