A flight instructor confessed on Reddit that he was struggling with making ends meet, a broken-down car, and problems in his relationship with his girlfriend. (Most of us can relate to one or all parts of this story.)
He works at a flight school with many international students. It is his first flight instructing job as he seeks to log 1,500 hours. He’s a little “put off” by the fact that some of the students have only a basic grasp of English, but accepts that it comes with the job. Flight school owners take note: He or his identical twin might be working for you right now.
Working with one particular student, this CFI speculated that it was going to be a long journey for her. Though she was extremely excited about learning to fly, she wasn’t a natural in the air. “We had about three ‘flight’ lessons just to cover preflight and taxiing, and she could barely maintain level flight,” he said.
After 10 hours, this student still wasn’t progressing “normally” (whatever that is). Pounding through patterns one day, trying to help the student get a sense of proper landing technique, “every time we would balloon or hit the runway hard,” the CFI said. “Sometimes she froze and other times she was sweating but I just couldn’t get her to relax.”
On their last trip around the pattern, the student set up a good approach but began to fall rapidly in a nose-up attitude 200 feet above the ground. Panicked, the CFI grabbed the controls and “barely recovered in a short final stall.” He yelled, “What were you thinking?,” cursed, and asked her what she was doing here anyway. She apologized and when the lesson ended, she grabbed her bag and left without getting a debriefing.
A few days later the CFI asked about the student, only to find out that she had gone back to her home country. The chief flight instructor said that this student had worked for seven years, saving every penny she had and selling her car, to come to the United States to become a commercial pilot. “It was her dream and we didn’t do our job,” the chief flight instructor said.
Several points need to be made here. First, the CFI recognized how badly he’d failed this student, and we hope he won’t make that mistake again.
Second, flight schools need to be cognizant that pilots don’t magically become good teachers just because they earn flight instructor certificates. A training program for new CFIs is starting to look like a really good idea, particularly when flight schools are hiring brand-new CFIs who might be starting not only their first teaching job, but also their first professional job.
Third, this flight instructor was dealing with some issues common to many young flight instructors—money concerns, relationship problems—in addition to working with a struggling new student. If he was your CFI, what would you have done?
This story has a happy ending, which the flight instructor posted on Reddit as well. The flight school got in touch with the student and convinced her to come back. She did—and was assigned a different instructor. The CFI apologized to her, which she accepted. The CFI said he believes he’s a better instructor because of this incident. We hope that’s true, but we wish he hadn’t come so close to crushing someone’s dreams to learn his lesson.
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