What do these videos have in common?

So what is it that they have in common? Simple.

Whatever it is you're making excuses for not being able to do, somewhere out there there is a 14-year-old girl doing whatever it is you "can't" and then some.

And if that didn't light a fire under your butt, she's probably doing it better too:

So whatever it is you want to do but "can't find the time/money/energy/etc." to accomplish, keep in mind that if you don't, someone else surely will. These girls didn't let age, the time demands of school, social pressures, or anything else stop them from getting on top of the world--why should you?

Glass Panels vs. Steam Gauges: Who wins? Who cares? Who needs 'em?

I'm in my late 30s; firmly in the Gen X category. I grew up playing video games starting with the Atari 2600, and I got a Commodore 64 when I was 9, so I've been soaked in technology for most of my life. In my former life, before I became a flight instructor, I was an IT guy. So you'd expect me of all people to be crazy about glass panels and gee-whiz technology.

The plane I got my private certificate and instrument rating in was a 2006 172SP, so it had a pretty Garmin G1000 glass panel. I'd say that I'm well above average in handling the complexities of glass, and I'd venture that with all the hours I've spent studying and teaching the G1000, I'm about expert in it now. I've flown Avidyne glass in hard IMC with relative ease.

I got my commercial (and multi), CFI, CFII, and MEI certificates on steam gauges. So, to get to the point, I've got a pretty fair amount of experience on both sides of the glass/steam debate. On one end, I've seen Garmin Perspectives that almost put a 787 to shame, and on the other end, the very first plane I ever flew hardly had enough to even be called steam, although it did have a 496:

Flight Design CTsw from the good old days back when they still offered a non-glass version.
There's a lot of brushed metal on that panel, isn't there?

This picture was taken during my second solo cross country, once I had the plane roughly stable enough to dig out the camera for a while. It was six years and almost an ATP certificate's worth of hours ago, so forgive the 80 feet I'm off altitude in the couple of minutes I took snapping pictures. (The old CTsw didn't trim out as nicely as the newer CTLS does anyway.) Somehow back then I knew I'd remember this plane even years later, even though I had no idea how many times I'd use this quick, fun snapshot as a training picture.

All the planes I've ever flown, from the CTsw above, through the six-pack 172s and Apaches and Seminoles, to the tricked out Cirruses with G1000s and Avidynes, have one thing in common: they all had more gauges than they needed. Yes, even ol' N40HA above. That little bird probably came closest to not being overkill, but it had the biggest attitude indicator on the planet! That's because its attitude indicator was the planet, and its attitude instrument filled the entire windscreen. You can't get more HD than that.

A panel like this one below was good enough to take Rinker Buck all the way across the country decades before GPS was even invented:

Piper Cub (from Wikipedia)

(As a side note, for a really good true story, you can read about his account flying that record-setting cross country as a teenager in Flight of Passage.)

Talk is cheap, so here's me putting my money where my mouth is and showing a student that a plane doesn't know what it's got up front and it doesn't care: pitch plus power equals performance no matter what. This means anyone can fly all the way around the pattern and land without having any glass at all, even me:

So, as you can see, the only instrument you need to fly an airplane is a piece of cork with a wire sticking out of it to show you your fuel level. If you have a watch, you don't even need that. You can take the weight you save on all the pretty bells and whistles and use it to bring along a couple of extra sandwiches to feed any aviator's most important instrument: the brain. A decent glass panel will help a good pilot be even better, but even the best glass in the world won't turn a bad pilot into a good one.

You've soloed. Now what?

Once a student has done their second solo, many times all they want to do is stay in the traffic pattern and practice touch-and-goes over and over again. Naturally, landing is one of the most important skills to have, but flying around in circles all day is not the most productive use of time, money, or enthusiasm. The freshly post-solo pilot is just that: a pilot. While being a pilot is cool, I don't train pilots: I train aviators. "Pilots" are people who wiggle sticks and jockey throttles, using their hands to regurgitate what they were told to do. "Aviators" are people who use their brains and hard-won skills to smoothly convince the plane that what they want to do was the plane's idea in the first place. It takes a lot more work and a lot more responsibility to become an aviator, just as it takes a lot more work and self-direction to make it to the NBA than it does to drop in on a pick-up game at the park.

I have a standard speech I give to those who have reached this stage. It goes something like this:

Congratulations! Now the hard part starts. You remember how I've told you before that as far as I'm concerned, my job is to put myself out of a job as soon as safely possible? You've now put me out of a job for the next several hours, and I couldn't be happier. It's now up to you to go out on your own and practice all those maneuvers we've been doing. This requires hard work and discipline on your part because just flying around aimlessly or sloppily (which tend to go hand-in-hand) is just a waste of your time, so you need to practice until you're twice as good as you'll need to be.

You'll know how good you need to be because of that magical book I told you about several lessons ago: the FAA's Practical Test Standards. Anything that's in that book is something that you can be tested on, and anything that's not in that book you can't be tested on. You'll know if you're doing it right because the book tells you what your standards are. For example, the tolerances on steep turns are +/- 100 feet on altitude, so practice until you can keep it within +/- 50 feet three times in a row. That way, if the stress of a checkride causes you to have a day that's 100% worse than you know you can do, you're still going to pass.

Have a plan for what you're going to practice before you even leave the ground. Make it no more than 1.5-2 hours, because if you're working hard like you should be, by the time you've flown for over an hour, you'll be mentally spent. The insidious thing about mental exhaustion is that it doesn't have a "burn" like muscle fatigue, which makes it so hard to spot that you probably won't think it's started to affect you. Believe me, it has, and it's also making your practice over 1-1.5 hours a waste of time. During your lessons with me, it's probably seemed I can read your mind sometimes because just when you're getting tired, I'll magically say, "Take me back to the airport." It's not that I have ESP; I just can recognize when you're starting to hit the point of diminishing returns. Not coincidentally, if you look in your logbook, you'll probably notice that most of our lessons have turned out to be in the 1.4-1.6 hour range, with the occasional 1.2 here or there on days you weren't at your peak or 1.7 on days you were really in the flow. I won't be there to tell you when to break it off anymore, so keep the 1.5-2 hour guideline in mind.

Sometimes practicing too long is even counterproductive because the maneuvers you might be practicing at the end aren't coming out very well, and you might think its because you just don't have the skills to become a pilot because you don't realize the reason they're coming out so sloppy is because you're mentally spent. Also, we all have bad days sometimes. If you get in the air and just don't feel like anything is going right, don't punish yourself or think you're not cut out for this. Just jump straight to your fun segment, head back to the airport, and call it a day. Trust me, you'll have a day later on where you can do no wrong, and it will all even out in the end.

You might have noticed that I said not to fly for more than 1.5-2 hours but not to practice for more than 1-1.5 hours. Where did the extra .5 go? That's for something else that's overlooked in the rush to the checkride: that time is reserved for enjoying the thrill of flying. Pick something fun to do for .4 or .5 hours. Go fly over your house or your old school or that park you like to jog in. Go check out the boats on the lake you like to fish in. Go see where that country road you've driven by a hundred times but never turned down goes. Go do whatever, as long as it's something fun you want to do (but remember to stay inside your designated practice area) and make an effort to stay reasonably within PTS standards while you're doing it. It's not a waste of time, because you'll be learning as you go in the most effective way: a way that is so sneaky you won't realize you're practicing. Flying over your old school/house/other objects teaches you ground referencing, flying down that back road teaches you about crabbing, and so on. All of them teach you about pilotage, which is a powerful enough skill that it got the mail from one coast to the other in planes that weren't nearly as nice as your trainer, and if you're holding your altitude while you're going there, you're turning that straight-or-level into straight-and-level, too.

So now the hard part has started. The good news is that the fun part has also started too! You won't have me in the right seat yapping away, but you also won't have me in the right seat to say, "That one could have been better. Let's do another one." That's on you now. You may think you're getting away with being sloppy since there's no one in the plane to tell you to do it again, but it will come around to bite you in the butt later on. Before you get signed off to take your checkride, I (and every other CFI in the world) will go up on at least a couple of simulated checkrides with you to make sure you pass. Remember, the FAA keeps track of our pass rate, so we're putting our reputation and certificate on the line every time we sign someone off, so you're going to have to be good before you'll even get past us, much less an examiner.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, and thus different maneuvers that are easy and hard for them to do. The temptation is to practice the things you're already good at because they're easy. That is exactly the wrong approach. As I pointed out in my Bob Hoover post, the way to get the most bang for your buck is to practice what you're not good at until you can turn your weaknesses into your strengths. If you go up and nail a maneuver on your first try, move on to the next one so you can devote your money and mental energy to more productive practice. Congratulate yourself on starting to really get this whole flying thing down, though!

There are two things you should be practicing on every flight: emergency procedures and slow flight. I'm going to devote a whole post on the first one as part of how to practice for free, because you don't have to pull the engine every time to practice emergencies, and engine-outs aren't the only type of emergency you may have (in fact, it's by far the least likely emergency you'll encounter, if you ever encounter one at all). You can spend some useful, free time practicing your emergency flows and checklists before you ever turn the key and start the Hobbs meter spinning.

Slow flight should be done every time, though, for two reasons: first, you're in slow flight on every single flight when you come in to land, so that maneuver you're practicing miles from the airport a few thousand feet above the ground will, believe it or not, help you out when you're 500 feet up and half a mile away from it. Second, and probably even more importantly, is that nothing teaches you to listen to what the airplane is saying to you better than slow flight. You're intentionally bringing it to one edge of its envelope, so you have to be its master.

In cruise flight, the plane is whispering to you, but in slow flight, it's screaming at you. Being able to understand its foreign vocabulary when it's speaking at the top of its voice makes it much easier to understand it when it's whispering, and no maneuver has as much crossover value for learning how to truly fly an airplane as slow flight does. Sure, slow flight scares some people because you're bringing it right to the edge of the stall and leaving it there as long as possible, so if you push it a little too hard you might end up stalling. So what? That just gives you a chance to practice a stall recovery and is immediate feedback that you need to be a little smoother on the controls or a little more on top of that throttle. If you're still too afraid to stall a plane on your own, you're not alone. However, it means I (or your CFI) didn't do my job right so far, so you need to haul my butt back in the plane until you know you have what it takes to recover, and you should probably yell at me for having failed you back then. (Of course, I'm exaggerating for effect, because it is natural to be comfortable with something when you know the sandbag in the right seat will bail you out if you really get in over your head but be a lot more timid when he or she isn't there anymore. Nevertheless, if you have an instructor worth their salt, they wouldn't have moved past stalls in your training if they didn't think you could recover, even if you may not think so. So you can, whether you fully believe that or not.)

While going out to the practice area, pick an altitude and heading and focus on maintaining it the whole time. If you pick 2,500 and 270, don't just go up to 2,800 and say, "Well, I'm at 2,800, so that's going to be my cruising altitude." (It sounds like I'm being sarcastic when I say that, but the next person to say that to me won't be the first.) Practice climbing to your selected altitude at a constant rate one flight, then practice climbing at a constant airspeed the next.

If your heading is going to be 270, then maintain it using the compass instead of the DG. Using the compass makes you a better pilot, because it's much harder to stay on heading using a compass than a DG, and you'll always be prepared in case your vacuum system or pretty glass panel goes kaput. On every other flight, pick your heading using a point out the window and fly to that without using any instruments at all. That's what turns you into an aviator instead of a pilot.

Your order may vary, but here's a general order I recommend people use for practice when they're out on their own in the practice area:

Steep turns (both directions, progressing to the one that gives you the most trouble once you've started to get really good)
Slow flight
Power-off stalls (all flap settings)
Power-on stalls (any flap settings you might typically use on takeoff)
Emergency descent to 1000 AGL
Continue descent to appropriate ground reference maneuver altitude
Turns around a point/S-turns
Simulated engine out
Climb to appropriate cruising altitude and use pilotage/dead reckoning to find something fun to fly to
Go back to home airport and land
If landing went well, make it a touch-and-go
Pull power to idle at midfield and practice engine out on your home turf
Taxi to ramp and shut down
Grin and pat yourself on the back for being one step closer to your goal!

You won't accomplish this entire list every flight, and it's not designed or intended to all be done every flight: there just isn't enough time to do all of them and still devote enough time to useful practice. I recommend "sliding the window" down the list each flight. For example,

Flight 1
Steep turns (several in each direction)
Slow flight
Power-off stalls (several)
Pilotage/dead reckoning fun

Flight 2
Steep turns (as necessary, but fewer than last time)
Slow flight
Power-off stall (one or two)
Power-on stalls (several)
Emergency descent
Pilotage/dead reckoning fun

Flight 3
Slow flight out to practice area once you've reached your cruising altitude
Power-on stalls
Emergency descent
GRM (ground reference maneuver) of your choice
Pilotage/dead reckoning fun

Flight 4
Slow flight out to practice area once you've reached your cruising altitude
Power-on stall (one or two)
Put plane in landing configuration and descend at approach airspeed to 1000 AGL
GRM that you didn't do last time
Simulated engine out
Pilotage/dead reckoning fun

And so on. Remember, these are just suggestions, and although I have both a rhyme and a reason for tying them together the way I do (for example, most airplanes tend to gain altitude in power-on stalls, so why not practice while you're climbing until you get high enough that you can practice getting back down either in a hurry or like you were coming in on final?), there's nothing that says you can't adjust them to suit your needs--in fact, that's exactly what you should be doing, since you're now PIC. These are routines I've found to be generally efficient and helpful, but you're the one who has to make them specific to your needs.

Once you're signed off to solo, you're given the power to take control of your training to an even greater extent than before. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and it's now more your responsibility to ensure you're training efficiently and effectively. Your CFI doesn't leave the picture, but when they sign those solo boxes off they transition to a mentor role instead of the mama bird role you've been used to having them in up until now. So go leave the nest, spread your wings, and enjoy this new stage of your flying experience!

They don't build airports like this anymore

One of the bigger impediments to growing the pilot population is that airports have lost much of their aesthetic charm. Airports are not the solitary, half-empty expanses of corrugated aluminum and concrete they all-too-often are today because of any of the tired, worn-out reasons the naysayers trot out over and over again: high fuel prices, ridiculously expensive aircraft, overly complex regulations, [insert your favorite gripe here], and so on. Airports are empty today because of what airports look like today.

Despite the claims that video games, social media, etc. are out-competing real airplanes for the attention of our youngsters, flying itself still has the same magical charm to them that has captured people for the last century. I've seen the excited young eyes too many times on discovery flights, dual flights given as birthday gifts, at air shows and Learn to Fly Day events to be worried about whether aviation still captures them: I know it does. The charm is still there, but we need to recapture the beauty of flight in part by recapturing the beauty of our airports.

Flying is still a dream of a huge number of people; in fact, if everyone who has told me they wanted to learn to fly actually started taking lessons tomorrow, it would be a catastrophe for me: I'd be working 24/7 immediately and indefinitely. Airports are the vehicle that dream moves around in, and just as no one dreams of driving a beat-up, rusty, run-down 1965 Mustang, we need to make airports a restored, nicely-purring, gleaming classic Mustang of their dreams. Do that, and we'll finally start going somewhere again.

Continuing the beater car analogy, let's borrow an idea from the TV show Pimp My Ride and start putting playgrounds with kid-sized runways and airplane swing sets and control towers with slides coming out the side of them just outside the ramp fence. That way kids can run-up while they run up and slip while they slip.

Compare the sterile barbed-wire-and-scary-sign look of a typical modern airport to the beautiful Art Deco terminal, complete with community office space, a doctor's office, post office, and fancy restaurant of New Orleans's Lakefront (formerly Shushan) Airport.

I'm not saying we need to completely rebuild our airports; a coat of paint and a parking lot that has been resurfaced in the last 30 years would be nice, but the single biggest change (and one of the cheapest) would be to replace the sign at the gate that typically says something like "Visitors will be shot on sight, then drawn and quartered, hung, and served as lunch at the next Cannibals Society meeting" with something containing simple, friendly instructions on where to go/who to talk to/etc. to get through the gate. Something like, "Visitors: please push the button to the left and we'll be happy to let you through the gate. Then take an immediate right and say hi to the person at the desk, who will then tell you how to get to where ever it is you need to go." This would have the happy side effect of completely enraging the reality-challenged desk jockeys at the TSA, whose actions show that they think the only secure airport is a closed airport. That makes it a worthy goal all on its own.

Airports are not a reverse jail designed to keep out the unwashed masses. We need to stop making them look like they are. Despite the imposing fence and/or decaying look, I have found almost everywhere that if you actually go through that gate, you'll find friendly people who are more than willing to talk about flying and might even give you a free ride! But don't just take my word for it: this woman is proving just how welcoming the typical airport denizen tends to be by hitching rides all across the country: www.jethiking.com

This six-year-old girl says all there is to say about flying

Low and slow in a Champ, grins and giggles... this is what flying is all about:

Bonus: here's a five-year-old girl actually flying a Cirrus:


She looks pretty happy about it, too! Flying has that effect on everyone. Not just elementary school girls, not just on old white guys, not just on [insert demographic here]. It touches EVERYONE with an inexpressible feeling of freedom. I could spend another thousand words going into what this feeling truly is, but a thousand books have already been penned on it and they still don't get to the core of it. It is one of those events that you can only understand by experiencing it.

So go take someone up flying and let them experience it for themselves. We can't all create our own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and better the lives of thousands at once, but we can be thousands of people changing the lives of a handful, which ends up just as good in the end.

This goes for you, too. Go take yourself up flying. Even if you're not a pilot and have never been in a small plane before, you can still take yourself up flying! You almost definitely have an airport within half an hour of you that has a flight school. Just walk in and ask for a Discovery Flight. Most of them have a special (usually along the lines of $99 for a half hour in the air), and at most places you don't even need an appointment. Just walk in the door and say, "Hey, I want to go flying." You don't have to sign up for lessons or even pretend to be interested in lessons: just walk in and away you'll go. But don't be surprised if you end up interested in lessons afterward!

If you're sincerely not interested in learning to fly yourself or have some major medical issue that would preclude you from getting a license but you know someone who might be interested, you can still take them up flying! Most places have gift certificates that are good for either a certain amount of money or a discovery flight. All you have to do is call them and they'll walk you through the simple process of getting a gift certificate. A discovery flight is quite likely one of the most unforgettable gifts you'll ever give, and it doesn't get outgrown like clothes or worn out like shoes. Once that flight is taken, it stays with that person forever. I've talked to people who have been flying for 50 years and they still remember their first flight and who made it possible for them. Depending on the plane, it's quite likely possible that you can even sit along in the back seat if you'd like.

Discovery flights are always my favorite flight to give. Sure, a lot of instructors don't like them because we get paid very little for them (by the time you add in all the unpaid ground time and only .5 hours of paid flight time, it tends to end up being less than minimum wage). I, however, enjoy Discovery Flights because in that short amount of time in the air, I get to teach a lesson that's not on any syllabus anywhere: that the sheer joy of flying makes life worth living. If I can teach them that most important lesson on that "noninstructional" flight, teaching them all the things they need to know to pass a checkride is a piece of cake for both of us.

Bob Hoover reveals THE secret to learning ANYTHING

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For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bob Hoover, he is a legend in aviation. His name is one that almost every pilot knows as well as Chuck Yeager, Maverick, or the Wright Brothers. He earned his fame doing aerobatics in planes that weren't "supposed" to be able to do them. Probably the best short introduction to what made him most famous is him pouring tea while doing a roll:

At Oshkosh 2011, Aero-TV had a multi-part video covering a talk he gave there. In one part, he casually (and without really trying) lays out what made him into the legend he is today:

In less than two minutes, he lets The Real Secret out of the bag: he practiced exactly those things that made him most uncomfortable. It may be surprising that one of the best pilots of all time initially struggled with airsickness, but he didn't let that stop him--instead, he actively sought out those maneuvers that made him uncomfortable and practiced them until they didn't!

The advice he gives isn't some New Age touchy-feely Oprah "The Secret" gobbledygook about how if you just keep wishing really hard, everything will magically fall into place and you'll get everything your heart desires. It isn't some Tim Ferriss "Four-Hour" nonsense about how if you learn a sliver of what you want to know about, you can just go ahead an call yourself an expert in no time. Hoover points out that he didn't overcome his problem quickly; it took a lot of focus, dedication, and work. It might not be the stuff to make a New York Times bestselling self-help book out of (and that's a reflection on the sorry state of what does make good "self-help"), but his message boils down to this:

If you're not good at something, work your tail off at it until you are. Then go find the next thing you're not good at and repeat.

When I give flight reviews, I always ask two questions: "What kind of flying do you usually do?" and "What is the one thing you're least good at or wish you were better at?" This allows me to tailor the ground portion of the flight review to refreshing and polishing the kind of flying that pilot does most and then use the flight portion to get them better at what they're not already good at.

This is also why I practically never cancel flights with students (unless the conditions are obviously unsafe or something that is so far out of their skill level that they'd just be overwhelmed to the point of beyond saturation). A monkey can learn to fly in blue skies and calm winds, but becoming a pilot requires pushing up against the comfort zone. The only way to expand your comfortable territory is to take a few steps past its borders into your own personal uncharted territory. I remember one time observing my student doing a preflight inspection on the light sport aircraft we were about to do a lesson in and watching in the background a Lear 45 come in with a serious crab and getting bumped around all the way down because of a gusty crosswind. Instead of canceling or trying to hint that today isn't a particularly good day to fly in such a small aircraft, I simply thought to myself, "Well, this is going to be an interesting lesson." How did I get to that point? By going up time after time on less-than-perfect days.

One of the things many pilots struggle with is crosswind landings. However, I think I land a little better with a crosswind than one straight down the runway. Is this because I'm SuperPilot? No. It has to do with how I approached my training. I was ready to solo by around 10-12 hours, but the prevailing winds in Spring here tend to be rather strong and southerly, so for a month, we had crosswinds that were too strong to safely do a first solo in. Instead of canceling my lesson time after time, I just kept coming in and practicing crosswind landings. I practiced them because they were hard and because they were a useful skill. It wouldn't be until 19 hours when I'd get a day where the winds were light enough to solo.

So go pick something you're not good at or you're afraid of and do it until you wonder why you ever thought it was hard. Afraid of talking to controllers? Plan cross-country flights to towered fields and get flight following along the way every time. Do your landings seem like they're good and bad totally at random? Get in the pattern and focus on holding each variable (airspeed, altitude, distance, power, etc.) constant one by one until you're able to pick exactly which runway stripe you want to put the plane down on. Afraid of stalls? Grab an instructor and do them until they're fun. (Yes, with enough dedicated practice, even stalls can be fun. I, like 90+% of pilots, hated doing stalls as a student. Now stall day is probably the basic lesson I look most forward to giving.)

I'll close by leaving you with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s "Six Rules":

Meet your instructor

There are two types of people: pilots, and everyone else. I take the massive second group and turn them into the elite first group. Not content with just a thin blue line, I launch people into the big blue sky long enough to let them launch themselves. And I have some fun along the way.

I'm the meat grinder that takes ground-bound people with a dream in on one side and produces aviators out the other side. Now let's get into what I had to do to have the privilege of doing so.

If you've picked an instructor, you might be wondering how they know all that cool stuff. Or, if you've got your license and are thinking of becoming an instructor yourself, you might be wondering what you have to do to pass on the wonders of flight to a new crop of pilots. Today's blog post will answer some of those questions.

To become a regular flight instructor (meaning not a Sport Pilot Instructor) in an airplane, here is a simplified list of the basic requirements per 61.181 in plain English:

• Commercial or ATP pilot certificate
• Instrument rating
• 18 years old (which you had to be to get a commercial certificate anyway)
• Pass the FOI (Fundamentals of Instruction) and FIA (Flight Instructor Airplane) written exams [Note: the FOI is waived if you already have a ground instructor certificate, and I'll get into more detail about the ground instructor certificate later in this post]
• Get spin training (don't let this deter you--it's more fun than you might think!) and an endorsement saying you completed it
• Get an endorsement saying you've been trained in the fundamentals of instructing
• Get an endorsement saying you're prepared to take the checkride (just like you had to get an endorsement for your private and commercial checkrides)
• Pass what will probably be the longest oral exam of your life and then the flight portion

If you're flying regularly, it will probably take 10 hours or less in the plane to learn the maneuvers from the right seat. After all, they're the same ones you did from the left seat to get your commercial certificate.

It took about an hour to do my spin training in a 172. We did five spins: the instructor demonstrated one to the left, I did one to the left, he demonstrated one to the right, I did one to the right, and then he had me pick which direction I wanted for the last one. The 172 is a lot harder to keep in a spin to the right than to the left, so I did my final one to the right. If you can get your spin training in a Tomahawk or an aerobatic plane or something that doesn't recover pretty much on its own like a 172 does, I'd highly recommend it. Even after spin training, I was still left wondering what would happen if one of my students got me into a spin in one of our light sports because doing spins in a 172 is almost like cheating: if you just let go of the controls it turns the spin into a dive. Eventually one of my students did get himself into an incipient spin during a power-on stall (that's why you don't try to pick up a wing with aileron--if you're close to the stall, pick the wing up with rudder!) and I was able to stop wondering. Turns out spin training wasn't just fun; it was useful. Its main utility was in letting me remain completely calm as the wing dropped sharply and the nose quickly pointed itself at the ground, because I'd seen worse. (I also learned that the CTLS also recovers as soon as you break the stall, just like a 172.) You don't get to do spins on your checkride unless you failed your checkide by getting into a spin, so enjoy it while you can.

If you want to continue on to the CFII, the instrument add-on probably won't take more than a few hours, especially if the flight school you're working with has trained CFII candidates before and have an idea what the examiner's series of approaches is likely to be. At ATP, I got 3 flights and then the checkride. The FAA reserves first crack at examining all CFI initial candidates, so it's likely you'll get an FAA inspector assigned by them when you first become an instructor. When you go for your instrument add-on, you are no longer an "initial", so you can use a regular DPE (Designated Pilot Examiner) for that. You need either a CFI or an MEI before the CFII because your flight instructor certificate is a certificate of its own (it's your pilot's license number with "CFI" at the end of it) and has its own single-engine or multiengine ratings. Once you get one of those, then your CFII is basically an addition of instrument instruction privileges to your flight instructor certificate, just like you add an instrument rating to a private or commercial pilot certificate. So it's possible to be a CFII without being a CFI if you got your MEI first. That just means you could only give instrument instruction in multiengine aircraft. That's why people who call themselves CFII only are technically incorrect: the CFII does not necessarily include the CFI. For a period of about two weeks, I was an MEI/CFII without being a CFI. For those two weeks, in the eyes of the FAA, I could teach someone to shoot approaches in a twin to ILS minimums with a 200 foot ceiling, but I couldn't legally teach them to putter a tiny Cessna 150 around the pattern on a clear blue day.

And, while I'm being pedantic:

1. No one should ever sign a logbook "Joe Q. Instructor, 1234567CFII 12/13". There is no such thing as a certificate that ends in "II". The instructor certificate is "1234567CFI" and that certificate has instrument instruction privileges on it. It doesn't mutate into "1234567CFII" at any time, no matter how well you did on your CFII checkride. When I give instrument instruction, I put (I) after my certificate number, but that's only to show the future examiner that the instruction was indeed given by an instrument instructor so it does count for the required hours for the instrument rating checkride (or IPC). I'm not going to make him query the FAA's airman database just to verify that I'm a "double-I" just because of my own pet peeve.

2. It's the same thing with a medical certificate. A First Class medical doesn't "become" a Second Class after six months: it's still a First Class but now only allows the holder to exercise the privileges of a Second Class. As an instructor, you only need a Third Class to instruct with a student pilot aboard. You can fly all day with a certificated pilot without a medical (for example, giving a BFR for someone who is current with a valid medical) because they are eligible to act (and are) PIC during the entire flight.

3. The term is "Certificated Flight Instructor". There is no such thing as a "Certified Flight Instructor". The FAA certificates airmen, it doesn't "certify" them. The difference to the average Joe is nil, but to lawyers it's enormous.

I'd say that about 90% of the work involved in becoming a flight instructor is book work, since you've got to have an in-depth knowledge of all the subjects in order to teach them to someone else. If you're like me and you like getting into the hows and whys of aeronautics and maneuvers, it will be time-consuming, but it will also be fun for you, especially if you want to do it at your own pace anyway.

Incidentally, I only went through Airline Transport Professionals because I had an instructing job waiting for me; if I had been doing it the way I preferred, I would have taken my time. Someday, when I have the time, I'll get more into what it was like cramming an entire CFI course into only two weeks with them. In the meantime, if you're considering doing the same and can't wait some indefinite amount of time, Ron Rapp wrote a very detailed account of his experience with ATP that starts with Day One and goes to the end of the course. Due to the standardized nature of their program, his story is quite similar to the experience I had with them in Atlanta. In fact, it's so similar that I could have written this snippet from Day Four verbatim myself: "The folks who are in the preceding class are currently in the second week of this 14 day program, and they look like they’ve been run over by a truck." My conclusion on the program as a whole is almost identical to his entry for Day Five as well, probably because our backgrounds going into the program were also quite similar.

You can start on the book work at any time (the sooner the better, because you can't know too much to become an instructor!), and almost all the books you need you already have for free either through the FAA's website or if you use ForeFlight on your iPad. Read and study the AIH (Aviation Instructor's Handbook), PHAK (Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge), AFH (Airplane Flying Handbook), and study the private and commercial PTS to where you can recite the standards from memory. (You'll need to know the private because that's what you'll be teaching to initial students, and you'll need to know the commercial because that's what level you'll have to perform to on the checkride.) For the CFII, read the IFH (Instrument Flying Handbook), the IPH (Instrument Procedures Handbook), and know the Instrument PTS and you'll be golden.

I'd actually highly recommend getting a ground instructor certificate first. You have to take the FOI (Fundamentals of Instruction) for either it or a CFI initial, and that material all comes from the AIH. You then take either (or both--I did both) the Advanced Ground Instructor (AGI) written and/or the Instrument Ground Instructor (IGI) written. The AGI is mostly like your commercial written over again except questions can be pulled out of any category, not just airplane. I got a couple of helicopter questions, one or two on airships, one on ultralights, etc., but about 90% of it was airplane or general questions you've already seen before on your CAX (Commercial Pilot Airplane) written. The IGI is pretty much identical to your instrument written. Once you take the FOI and AGI and/or IGI, all you have to do is set up an appointment at the FSDO (Flight Standards District Office--basically a branch office of the FAA; go here to find the one closest to you), take the results to them, and they give you a ground instructor certificate (at no cost to you). The two big advantages of doing it that way are 1. you are studying this material anyway, so it helps you out (and the IGI and FII--Flight Instructor Instrument--are practically identical, which gives you even more practice) and 2. when you go for the oral portion of your exam, the examiner is allowed to skip Area of Operation I of the Flight Instructor PTS! The FAA considers Area I to have been covered by the process of getting the ground instructor certificate and therefore removes it from the PTS matrix if you already have an AGI/IGI, so you can save yourself some grilling at the oral. Since you had to take the FOI to get it, when you go for your initial checkride, you give the examiner your ground instructor certificate to copy in lieu of your FOI written results (since the FSDO keeps them). Sure, it's an extra $150 or $300 spent (depending on whether you took one or both writtens), but it's worth the investment in my opinion. (I intentionally left out the BGI because it's merely a stripped down, category-specific version of the AGI. I think the difference between the two isn't enough to make it worth going for the more restricted BGI instead of the AGI. If you're going to do the work anyway, you might as well go for the AGI.) If you ever want to become a Gold Seal instructor, you need at least one of these anyway, and you'll already have it knocked out in that case.

Whether or not you got that ground instructor certificate, you'll still have to write up lesson plans for your CFI binder and deliver at least one ground lesson as part of the oral portion. You can (and in fact, are highly encouraged to) create lesson plans for all of the maneuvers before the checkride and use them to teach from during the oral. (In fact, at ATP, we weren't even allowed to get signed off to take the checkride unless we showed them that we had all the lesson plans already done as part of our pre-signoff checklist.) The AIH has a lesson plan template in it. Use it, because no examiner will ever say "I don't like your layout" if you're using the FAA's way of doing it. You can go above and beyond the template, as long as everything in the template itself is there. The first few will take a while to put together because you're doing a lot of research, figuring out what's important and what level of detail would just confuse a student pilot, and putting jargon into your own words and adding your own insights, but after a while you'll be knocking out several an hour. The rest of your "CFI binder" is composed of whatever supplementary material you think might be useful in explaining concepts. For example, I have diagrams on how a constant speed prop system works, a nice article on what manifold pressure actually is, reproductions from the AFH on what the ground reference maneuvers look like, flash cards on runway signs, and a ton of other materials (mostly free handouts I've accumulated from FAA seminars, etc.) in it. By the time I was done, it was about four inches thick. Depending on your style, you may use that binder for your entire teaching career. However, if you're like me, your binder has migrated to the iPad and now consists mostly of dozens of links to YouTube videos, references to the PHAK/AFH/etc., and the lesson plans in electronic format.

During my oral, I had to give a lesson on teaching the Vmc Demo (because my initial was the MEI instead of the CFI) and the accelerated stall. The examiner told me to teach him those, then said he'd be back in 30 minutes to see what I had prepared. This was the closest I came to busting my test, because about halfway through my presentation he said, "Stop. Look, I know what this means and I can see that you know what this means, but if I'm a student pilot that just came off the street, I'd probably have no idea what you're talking about." So I took a deep breath, stepped back from the board for a few seconds, and reverted to my natural teaching style, which leans heavily on metaphors and similes referencing things people already know about. People already know about birds, so I used them in analogies when getting into more technical details. He was quite satisfied after that.

The only other time he looked displeased was when he asked me what the tolerances for some maneuver were (I can't remember exactly which one) at the private level and I said, "I think it's +/-100 feet" [or something like that] and he said, "How are you supposed to teach this if you don't even know what the standards are?" I said, "OK, it's +/-100 feet." I was right (and even when I said it the first time I was already 95% sure I was right), and we continued. The biggest lesson from that was that you should be projecting CFI authority at all times during your checkride. Remember back to your student pilot days? Back then, CFIs were these magical creatures that were 10 feet tall that knew all and could bail you out of any situation you might get yourself into. That's what you should be projecting during the checkride: that you know this stuff so well that you can make anyone else know it well, too. In fact, last month our FSDO had its annual flight school meeting where DPEs and flight school representatives spend the day together giving each other feedback. All of the DPEs said that the problem they most consistently saw from CFI candidates was the reluctance to take charge of the checkride. Instead of replying to a question with, "THIS is the answer blah blah blah," they'd timidly reply, "Umm, this?" Everyone knows that even on a private checkride, the candidate is PIC, but the student doesn't have enough experience to overcome the awe of the examiner and fumbles and mumbles. At the CFI level, you should be willing and able to speak with authority. Even if you get tripped up on something that you're not sure about, say, "HERE'S where we can get the FAA's official opinion" with authority and then flip straight to it. No one person can know everything about flying, and no reasonable examiner expects you to. However, an examiner will certainly expect you to have the knowledge of where the answer is. If you're not sure, it's probably in the PHAK. The oral portion of my initial was about 5 hours of rapid-fire questions. When he heard the FAA terminology he was looking for, he'd cut me off mid-sentence and go on to the next topic. We covered at least 100 topics, and I think I only had to crack my references open twice (both times it was the PHAK).

The flight portion of your CFI initial is identical to your commercial checkride (except you'll probably have to do almost all of the maneuvers instead of a smaller selection) plus you'll have to do an accelerated stall demonstration (Area XI-D; those aren't on any other PTS you've had), which is basically just an intentional stall during a steep turn. The big difference is that instead of a conversation like this that you had on your commercial checkride:

Examiner: "Give me a chandelle."
You: "OK." [You clear the area and do a chandelle.]

the CFI checkride is like this:

Examiner: "Give me a chandelle."
You: "OK. The first thing we do before any maneuver is clear the area to make sure there isn't any other traffic. We'll do this with a 90-degree turn to the left, followed by another 90-degree turn to the right (or vice-versa). As we're turning, we're looking for other airplanes. [As you're clearing the area, you continue by saying] Then, once we get back on our initial heading, we'll first bank the airplane and establish 30 degrees of bank. Then once we've got our bank in, we'll start increasing our pitch up to about 15 degrees [or whatever is appropriate for your aircraft] so we reach our 15 degrees nose up at the same time we've turned 90 degrees. Once we pass the 90 degree point, we'll hold that pitch constant the rest of the time and we'll start working out our bank so that our wings are level at the same time we've turned 180 degrees. We'll know we did a good job if the stall warning horn is going off as we're leveling out, because that means we've wrung out all the performance the plane can give us. So, in short, for the first half we're getting our bank then it stays constant while we adjust our pitch, and for the second half we're keeping our pitch constant and changing our bank. Any questions? No? OK, here we go. [Start maneuver and say] First I'm establishing my bank, and now I'm bringing the nose up. We're at the 90 degree point, our bank is still 30 degrees and our pitch up is at maximum. I'm keeping that nose up as I start leveling out the wings, and you'll notice that I need more and more back pressure to keep that nose up as the plane slows down. [Stall warning] So, we've rolled out on the heading opposite the one we started on, our stall warning baby seal is getting squashed, and we've gained 300 feet of altitude [or whatever your plane gets], so now we'll recover by holding this heading and altitude as we get our cruise speed back."

So all you're doing is chattering away the whole time. It's harder than it sounds, but after a few hours of practice it will feel as natural as anything else. I've gotten to the point now where flying by myself almost seems strange because I'm not hearing my own voice in my headset explaining what I'm doing. The other difference is that you're doing all this chattering from the right seat, so you've got two adjustments to make at once. Just like talking, once you get used to it, it's natural. I'm probably better at landing from the right seat than I am from the left seat now, but it's been so long since I've been in the left seat that I haven't had a chance to test that hypothesis.

Becoming an instructor is one of the most rewarding things you can do in aviation, and having a good instructor is something you'll always remember. I learned more about flying in my first 50 hours of instruction than I did in the 300 hours of flying I had done before then. Having to explain something to someone instead of just doing it makes you pick apart why you're doing what you're doing and tests whether you really understand what you're doing in the first place. It's increased my skills to the point where I'll occasionally surprise my students by seeing things when they think I can't possibly tell. For example, when working with a pre-solo student in the pattern, once we're downwind I very rarely look out the front until we're close to turning final. They probably think I'm just staring out the side window going along for a ride. In reality, I'm looking just ahead of the wing, with the end of the wing just off the center of my vision so the nose is in my peripheral vision. I can tell just from the angle of the wing to the horizon what their airspeed is, and I've taken more than one person by surprise by asking (with my hands not even on the stick), "The controls feel mushy, don't they?" They'll look down at the airspeed indicator and see they're 10 knots too slow and think I'm magic. All I'm doing is seeing the wing too close to parallel to the horizon when it should be about 4 degrees down (or whatever angle is appropriate for the plane we're in). I'm flying the wing instead of an instrument. Other times I'll say, "You need more left rudder" when they're turning to the base leg while still looking out the side. They're astonished that I can tell that without looking at the ball until I explain, "You see how it seems like you're have to drag that nose along? That's because you need more left rudder after pulling the power out for the same reason that you need right rudder when you put power in on takeoff." All I'm doing is seeing that nose yaw to the right out of my peripheral vision. It's not magic; it's just experience I've gotten by being able to step back and get the big picture as an instructor instead of the tunnel vision all student pilots (including me, back in the olden days) have. Being able to see all the pieces and their relation to one another is, to me, fascinating.

Being able to watch the light bulb come on in my students or fellow pilots is gratifying. Recently, I flew with a certificated pilot who has had his license for a couple of years but still isn't happy with the consistency of his landings. His landings themselves were satisfactory, but he wanted to work on being able to consistently land on the spot he picked on the runway instead of sometimes being too low or sometimes landing 3,000 feet down the runway. (By the way, one of the surest signs of a good pilot is that they're not afraid to keep learning after they get their certificate, so they'll occasionally bring an instructor up with them to work on getting even better. That's also the reason the FAA requires a flight review every two years.) After half a dozen times around the pattern, seeing how changing the pattern width, the time (and amount) of pulling the power out, the timing of flap extension, the maintenance of the proper airspeed, and all the other factors that go into a stabilized approach change where you end up, I could see the light bulb go on for him. Our last five times around the pattern we ended up right on the 1,000 foot markers every time without throttle-jockeying on final, and as we were taxiing back to the ramp after the last one, he said, "That was a very useful flight today." That made me quite happy, because that's exactly what my job is: to take "normal" people and make pilots out of them and to take pilots and make even better pilots out of them. Now he enjoys flying even more because he can worry less about where the landing is going to be. It's no longer a random hand from the deck of cards handed out by the aviation gods: he understands that each and every approach is something he has full control of the whole way down.

The point of the last two paragraphs is that when you're looking for an instructor, the most important, number one, biggest and most deciding factor is that they should truly care whether you are learning or not. If you don't feel your instructor cares whether you understand, or they don't present the material in a way that makes you understand and aren't willing to present it in a different way, find another instructor. A good instructor is as much a psychologist as a pilot, and I've had to find other approaches on the spot to figure out a different way to explain something. No matter how good a pilot they may be, if they don't care about making you a good pilot too, then you should find someone else. Don't give up on flying, though! I have yet to find someone I couldn't turn into a pilot; all I've found is some people that will take longer than others. It's my job to turn you into a pilot; all you have to provide is the desire, motivation, and willingness to do the hard work it involves. That means you and I work as a team: you have to be willing to do the reading, studying, chair flying, and being prepared to learn during your lesson and I have to turn that motivation into aviation.