What is “a good CFI”?
Lesson #1: Care About Your Students
This question has come up lot since I started flight training: What is “a good CFI”?
The answer may mean different things to different people, but there are some common traits of what constitutes a top-tier, quality CFI that we can all agree on. The Flight Attitude will provide you with guidance and answers to this question in its new series entitled, “What is “a good CFI”?”
Some flight school owners & operators will argue that “a good CFI” is one who flies 8 hours a day, thereby generating a ton of revenue for the school. As a small business owner, I get that. Flight schools have slim profit margins so company leadership will absolutely appreciate the CFIs who are top earners. But if you ask student pilots, you’ll likely get a different answer. If they’re spending hundreds of dollars an hour to fly, quality trumps all; otherwise, they’re just burning through their hard-earned money, wasting their time, and not making any progress towards their goals.
The FAA does a great job explaining which characteristics CFIs should possess in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook. I strongly encourage you to read through it cover to cover. I particularly like the section on “professionalism” and it’s a topic my CFI DPE and I discussed for over an hour during my CFI Initial checkride. The purpose of this series, however, is to provide you with more context and real world experiences that you may not see in the textbooks.
Lesson #1: Care about your students. After I passed my Commercial checkride and was about to start my CFI training, a well-respected DPE told me to, “care about your students.” It seems like such a simple statement, but it carries a lot of weight, which is why it’s #1 on the list in this series.
What does it mean to “care about your students”? To keep it simple, it means that as a CFI – you need to put your students’ needs and goals before your own. Top-tier CFIs aren’t providing instruction to build hours and make money; those things are nice, but merely a byproduct of flight instruction. Students can smell these types of CFIs from 10,000’ up and they’re usually the ones you want to avoid. At the end of the day, as a CFI, you provide a very expensive service to a customer and it needs to be done safely, so you should care about and take pride in how you do it.
It starts with getting to know your students. Most importantly, understand their needs and goals upfront because if you don’t know what they are then you can’t help them meet and achieve them. It helps to determine what motivates them. It’s also important to understand their personal lives, so ask them: how do you earn a living? Are you in school? How are you paying for flight training? Are you married? Do you have kids? Are you living the single life? What part of town do you live in? How will you commute to the training center? What kinds of hobbies do you have, etc.? This is a brief list of the items I asked each student at the beginning of their training because it all matters. I would also tell them about myself, of course, because the CFI/student relationship is a two-way street. And maybe you have some things in common, which always help when building relationships. This is the beginning of a professional relationship and the answers to these questions can help you provide better instruction. It helps you understand their motivations and how they learn/process information so you can tailor your approach to each individual student. You also need to use this time to set up expectations for their training (e.g., showing up on time and being prepared, keeping the communication lines open, determining the schedule/availability, managing time & self-studying, etc.). Right out of the gates, you’re demonstrating that you care.
I cannot stress this enough – your students do not want to feel like just another student at the school; that they’re just a number. Treat them as individuals. Each student is different and you need to work hard to understand and help them achieve their goals. Providing meaningful guidance is not easy. It takes time and an effort that goes above what’s expected. And I’m not going to lie, it feels pretty darn good when a student tells you how much of a difference you’ve made in his/her life.
There are dozens of topics that branch off from the “care about your students” concept. My initial plan was to include all of them in one article, but after more thought I decided that each can stand on its own so expect them to be covered in future posts in this series. Some of these topics include providing quality ground instruction, having the difficult discussions, and admitting your mistakes.
So as this series progresses, continually ask yourself – what kind of CFI do you want to be?
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them. If you have any questions or feedback please send The Flight Attitude a message via our contact form: https://www.theflightattitude.com/contact-us/
