3 Questions To Ask Yourself When Assessing Prospective Flight Instructors
Posted on: 22 March 2017
Choosing a suitable aviation school can be difficult, but the most important thing is to ensure you are choosing the correct instructor for your needs. To help you with this, ask yourself the following three questions to help screen any prospective candidate:
Are They Competent?
When it comes to flying lessons, you are literally putting your life in your instructor's hands. As such, you need to be able to trust them entirely. As a student, it can be difficult to gauge the competence of an instructor, and you feel nervous about judging them on their skills. However, it is imperative that you choose a fully competent professional to ensure your ongoing safety and development.
Many prospective students make the mistake of looking for instructors with high pass rates. They reason that the instructor must be a good teacher to help so many students achieve their goals. However, an extremely high pass rate can also suggest that an instructor is too lenient, which is not what you are looking for when it comes to flight training. What you need is an instructor who demands extremely high standards, but who is fair and will work closely with you to achieve such a high standard.
What Do They Want to Achieve?
Each flight training instructor will have different career goals. One instructor may truly enjoy the teaching process and will have aspirations of opening their own flight training school. However, another instructor may be using training to bridge a gap whilst they wait on a commercial role coming through. At the outset, your instructor's career goals may not seem important; however, they will ultimately have a major impact on your development.
When looking for a great instructor, you need to know that they are in it for the duration. You do not want to be changing instructors every couple of months because your instructors keep leaving to work for major airlines. Rather, you should seek out instructors who are passionate about imparting their knowledge and will stick with you from the start of your training until you earn your wings. There is nothing wrong with instructors who wish to move on to commercial flying, but you do not want to hire one to look after your early training.
Are You a Good Match?
Learning to fly is a very long process, and it takes a significant amount of training before you are able to set off on your own. As such, it is extremely important that you find an instructor that you click with to ensure that your training is enjoyable and you are excited about getting to your next lesson.
It is often said that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but first impressions are extremely important when it comes to choosing a flight instructor. You simply don't have the time to meet every prospective teacher in order to find the right balance, so you need to go with your instinct on this. The best way to do this is to ask each prospective instructor about their teaching methods. Do they prefer sitting down and talking through each lesson before setting off? Or do they prefer to show things from a practical perspective as they are going through the motions? Asking these questions and other things you find important will allow you to picking an instructor with a teaching style that suits you.
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