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Finding Good Flight Instruction
Over Christmas I got several emails from folks looking for tips on finding good flight instruction. Unfortunately for me they were hoping I could help them find good airplane or powered-paraglider instructors. If the were looking for trike instruction I would have told them "look no farther" :-).
But whatever aircraft you want to learn how the fly the principals of finding good instruction are the same, and I covered them in an article I wrote for one of the Light Sport magazines a couple of years ago. The article is below and for those of you looking for flight instruction I hope you find it instructional.
What makes a good flight instructor? And remember, by good I don’t just mean he or she is competent. I also mean they are safe and will teach you how to be safe.
What to look for in a flight instructor
Reputation
Reputation is the first thing I’d look for. Is this instructor known in the industry as a professional? Is he or she well-respected. What do his students say about him? I’m going to cover other characteristics of good flight instructors but if they have a good reputation then they probably score high in the other “good instructor” characteristics too.
There are a number of places you can go to learn about an instructor’s reputation. You can try the various blogs and social networks on the internet to see what others are saying about them. Go online and ask around. Check out the aviation clubs to see what they’ve heard or would recommend. Go to EAA’s website (http://www.eaa.org/chapters/) to find their clubs (called chapters). Another great source of information is the students themselves. Call up the instructor(s) you are considering and ask them for student referrals. The instructor will have to get permission from his students to give out contact information but most students are more than willing to talk to other enthusiasts about their experiences.
Obviously, brand new flight instructors will not have established a reputation yet. Does that mean you should avoid them? No. I’m going to cover new instructors in more depth in the next section but they will be learning as much as you from the training experience so they fall into a different category.
Experience
After reputation look for experience. Experience is more than how long so-and-so has been teaching. Ask for the number of instructional hours an instructor has. Many instructors have been “instructing for years” but on closer examination they only instruct a few hours a year, while other instructors may not have been teaching as many years but have accrued many more hours instructing. Look for hours rather than years.
Why is experience so important? Well certainly from a safety perspective someone who has more experience should be safer. While that is not always the case it is certainly a good guide. An experienced instructor knows when he can let students make mistakes, turning them into teaching opportunities, and when he must take control of the aircraft for safety’s sake. And we learn by our mistakes, provided they don’t kill us. Making mistakes and having the instructor walk us through our mistakes is powerful training. But this comes with experience.
By the way, there can be an interesting exception to the experience rule. One of the suggestions I make to my new instructors, to help them get experience, is to offer their first students free lessons. My first few students were friends who wanted to fly. They knew I was a brand instructor so we made a deal. They let me use them as student guinea pigs, so that I could develop my curriculum and teaching style. In exchange, I gave them free instruction (they just covered the cost of the plane). If you know someone who is brand new you might talk to him about doing this kind of a deal to help him build instructional experience. It may take you longer to learn but you may be able to save some money and help a new instructor gain experience at the same time.