In this case, a flight instructor had been teaching budding pilot applicants and sending them to the FAA with her endorsement that the students had been trained and were prepared to take the FAA's test. The instructor had been teaching full-time for about 15 years, and for the most part, her students had successfully completed their tests and were awarded airman certificates and ratings. However, a couple of the instructor's students had received failure notices from the FAA designated examiners conducting the tests, and this circumstance caught the attention of an FAA inspector.
As the inspector would later testify at the hearing, because of the unusually high number of problem areas demonstrated by the students during their tests, he became concerned about the instructor's qualifications to make proper endorsements concerning the student's readiness. And, upon further investigation, the inspector identified other concerns. Therefore, the inspector sent a letter to the instructor requesting that she submit to a re-examination of her qualifications to hold her flight instructor certificate. Because she believed that the request was unwarranted, the flight instructor refused and the FAA initiated action to suspend her flight instructor certificate until she took and passed a re-examination. The instructor appealed.
The NTSB upheld the FAA's action, finding that the FAA had established a reasonable basis for requesting a re-examination. However, the NTSB's ruling seemed to go beyond the facts presented in the case. This case had involved several allegations, including that there was a high failure rate associated with students coming from a single instructor, there was a commonality of failed test items, and the instructor's failure rate had increased over the preceding two years.
But, before addressing these allegations in total, the NTSB considered the single circumstance of one student's failure implicating an instructor's qualifications. The NTSB stated that, "Just as a lack of pilot competence can be a factor in an aircraft incident or accident, a student pilot's failure on a flight test might be attributable to the deficient performance of his or her instructor. That nexus would...be enough to justify a re-examination request of a flight instructor for even one failure of only one of his or her students because the student would not have been able to take the test without the instructor's written endorsement that he or she was ready (i.e., prepared) to take and pass it. A failure therefore inevitably calls in question the validity of the signoff or the adequacy of the instruction underlying it, notwithstanding the myriad other factors that either actually, or could have, caused or contributed to the unsuccessful performance."
The NTSB recognized that instructors routinely make judgment calls affecting the personal safety of others - for example, when the instructor gives a student an endorsement to take a solo cross-country flight. The NTSB felt that this justified a higher scrutiny of an instructor's actions than might otherwise be given a pilot.
The FAA does not routinely re-examine an instructor's qualifications following one student's failure, and there is no real indication that it will do so in the future. Still, this case serves as an indicator of how an instructor's ability to prepare and present a student to exercise pilot privileges may be viewed. And, it serves to remind instructors to proceed with caution when giving endorsements that judge the student to be prepared and competent to fly.
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