How do we prepare for a CFI checkride?
And, then, by the way, how do we prepare our learners for their first checkrides?
Hey, everyone, Jason Schappert here, MZeroA.com.
You are listening to, don't tell anybody, my favorite podcast out of all of them.
I'd say it's the CFI, the Certificated Flight Instructor Podcast.
You know we produce four podcasts: the Private Pilot Podcast,
the Instrument Pilot Podcast,
the Commercial Pilot Podcast,
and of course, what you're listening to right here,
the CFI Podcast.
Do you want to hear something else fun?
I've been sharing this a lot lately.
I just learned it not too fairly long ago.
All four podcasts
are in the top 25 all-time in the aviation category on iTunes.
That's pretty cool.
So, we own four of the top 25 spots all-time.
What an honor.
And, even the CFI Podcast.
Again, these are very niche-based podcasts.
As you can imagine, private pilot gets the most listens out of everything.
This one gets the least amount of listens.
But, it's fascinating to me.
First off, those of you that do listen to this--
And, you come from all walks of life.
Not all of you even want to be CFIs, you just want to learn more.
And, I find that fascinating to me.
And, it's even more fascinating, the CFIs who just take the time to be here.
I say this every episode.
And, hopefully, affirmations are your thing.
But, it's incredible to me that CFIs who are willing to give up time
out of their day to learn more,
that's pretty intriguing to me,
that you would do such a thing.
If every CFI in the country would be willing to continue to learn,
we wouldn't need the NTSB, for aviation, at least.
It's fascinating to me.
Anyways, I'm rambling.
We're here to talk about two things.
We're here, first, to talk about your CFI checkride for you.
And, then, I want to talk about how to prepare your learners,
remember, that's our new word for student, not our new word, the FAA's new word.
How to prepare for their checkrides as well.
Let's start with you, though, because, perhaps,
you saw the Tuesday video where I dropped the stats.
And, again, they roughly say 80%
first-time failure rate for a CFI checkride.
Gee, thanks, Jason.
That was really great of you to share.
I don't know the exact data.
It's high up there, though.
It's up there.
It may be 80%.
It may be 75%.
I don't know.
I know I could easily find that data,
and will, to back it up a little bit for you.
But, let me just share with you, it's up there and it's a hard checkride.
Because, like I shared in the Tuesday video on YouTube and Facebook,
and if you haven't seen that yet, I encourage you,
if you're listening to this later in life, this is May 2021,
head over to the MZeroA YouTube channel.
We're in Mock Checkride May for the year of 2021.
And, go find the CFI video to help you out with that.
You'll know what I'm sharing, what I'm talking about
in how we can prepare for the CFI checkride.
And, the big part of that was just make your own lesson plans,
for goodness's sake.
That's the biggest part of it for me.
Well, at least, there's more to it than that.
Preparing for that CFI checkride,
you've heard me say it's really two checkrides in one.
If you're watching this as a video,
I'm holding up the private pilot checkride book
and the commercial pilot checkride book, because it's two checkrides.
Teach me hypoxia at a private pilot level.
And, now, teach it to me at a commercial pilot level.
Same topic, a different level of understanding,
a different level of teaching.
And, that can be a unique challenge to our learners as well, and to us,
to teach such a thing.
Wow, can we do a whole podcast on being a CFI,
helping another person become a CFI?
Show of hands, who wants something like that?
That poses an interesting challenge as well.
But, let's start with you.
Then, let's go to your learners.
And, let's end with you being the CFI teaching the CFI
because that doesn't happen all that often.
Not every CFI goes on to create more CFIs.
That's a niche within a niche, sometimes.
But how do you best prepare for your CFI checkride?
As I alluded to on Tuesday, just to recap, you need to make your own lesson plans.
Seriously.
You cannot go into this
without creating your own lesson plans.
I don't know how else to explain it.
You will--
Gosh, I hate to say you will fail.
That sounds so negative.
You will not be set up for success.
How about we say it that way?
You will not be set up for success if you go into this thing,
having not created your own lesson plans.
But, it goes deeper than that.
What I didn't get into in the Tuesday video
that I have the opportunity to get into here is,
in your lesson plans,
rather than grabbing the FAA's images, I want you to hand-draw.
I don't care if you're not an artist.
I want you to draw your own images.
Allow me to explain.
Can you draw your airplane's fuel system?
Heck, I think you should draw the electrical system.
Call me crazy, but at least draw a very basic diagram,
and write "flaps," and write "Bus 1" and "Bus 2,"
because a question is, what's on Avionics Bus 1?
What's on Avionics Bus 2?
Do you even have multiple buses in your aircraft?
You may not, if it's an older aircraft.
Can I draw the electrical system, the fuel system, the vacuum system,
if you have one?
My propeller governor system, if you have such a thing.
With my flyweights, and show my flyweights in an overspeed,
in an underspeed configuration.
Can you show me all of these things?
Because let me tell you something.
If you just go on the internet and look for a propeller system image,
you will find it, and you'll copy it from Google Images,
forget about the copyright, probably.
"Who cares about that?" you may say.
And, paste it in there.
And, it's just your lesson plans.
It's not a big deal.
It's not like this is for public consumption.
And, you put that in there.
But, copy-paste does not allow you to learn it.
There is something about sitting down
and having to draw the system out
that forces you to learn it in a new way.
Maybe, you're a kinesthetic learner and that just clicks with you.
Maybe, you're a visual learner
and that just kicks with you that much more.
I don't know what it is,
but that is what allows you to learn at a deeper level.
Maybe, you're an auditory learner.
That's why you're listening to this as a podcast, in the first place.
That's why the audiobooks are so well-suited for you,
and even the private and the commercial, and the instrument, for II, eventually,
audiobooks will serve you to help you learn and understand things at that higher level.
So, what am I saying here?
Hey, in your lesson plans, draw your own figures.
When I was going to become a helicopter pilot--
And, as of this record,
I just have my private, my instrument in rotorcraft.
It's my aspiration now just to jump to ATP next from here.
But, even at the private pilot checkride level,
there are so many new things.
Helicopter aerodynamics are so different.
There's new terminologies,
dissymmetry of lift and loss of tail-rotor effectiveness,
and all these different factors and buzzwords and aerodynamic principles,
I just wasn't familiar with coming from the fixed-wing environment.
I went in and I drew them.
I just drew pictures of helicopters, aerodynamics and rotor systems,
and everything else.
And, I prepared for a private pilot rotorcraft checkride
like it was a CFI checkride, because I made lesson plans,
I drew things out.
And, guess what? The examiner loved it.
He even said, "Wow, I've never seen anybody do this for a private pilot checkride."
And, I said, "Listen, I'm a flight instructor in the fixed-wing environment,
and this is how I teach."
So, for a private pilot checkride,
I'm teaching and explaining these things to you
and showing you that I know them.
I want to understand them on a level where I can teach them to you.
So, allow me to teach you just for a second.
And, again, passed.
I did my private and my instrument checkride the same day.
That was not recommended.
That wasn't a marathon day.
It felt like my CFI checkride back for a fixed wing
because that was a four or five-hour checkride as well.
And, that's something else.
You need to know and understand that this will be a marathon checkride.
Mine was over two days.
And, yours probably should be, too.
Very few people can do a four or five-hour ground oral exam
and then go hop in the airplane and fly for two hours on the Hobbs.
That doesn't include pre-flight time, post-flight time.
It is just such a marathon day.
I would recommend making it two days.
I remember, many of you may not know this,
I actually went to checkride school to become a designated pilot examiner.
I actually never went through those.
It was just a matter of paperwork,
as to finishing it up to become a checkride examiner.
And, it just didn't fit with my career goals at that time.
And MZeroA was certainly not as big as it is now,
but it was growing.
And, I would argue, if I became a checkride examiner,
MZeroA would not be the 33-person company that it is today,
and continuing to grow,
because a checkride examiner is very much a full-time job.
But, I learned so much just by going to checkride school.
And, I remember one thing they said.
They said, "Listen, if you are doing a CFI checkride in less than four hours,
that's going to set off a red flag in our system."
They literally said that.
They want to see no one--
I think they worded it literally,
"It is not possible to do a CFI checkride in less than four hours.
So, we don't want to see that."
That's what they're teaching, the DPEs.
We don't want to see it less than four hours.
So, you better believe, four hours gets them in trouble.
So, it's probably going to be more like five hours, six hours.
Comment below if you've done a CFI checkride,
how many hours was your CFI checkride?
Because, they are measuring hours, four-plus, usually, over multiple days,
typically, as well.
So, just be mindful of preparing for that.
But, I am telling you,
the crux of all of this comes down to your lesson plans.
Creating them yourself,
creating the images,
drawing them out yourself.
Even if you go to Google and Google Images
to just get an idea of what they should look like,
and then hand-drawing them yourself
and add in your notes and your notations and everything else.
This is not a waste.
Let me tell you something.
Your lesson plans you create,
this is going to follow you for a very, very long time.
Seriously, I still, to this day,
reference my original CFI lesson plans that have to be--
They're not quite 20 years old, yet,
but they're getting close to 20 years old now.
I've been at this a lot.
I've been flying 20 years, not a CFI 20 years.
So, they're not that old,
but they're getting old and I still reference them here to this day,
I and II lesson plans, and MEI lesson plans, for that matter.
They are a gift because it's great to go back
to where was I thinking in that season when you're so engrossed.
Because, sometimes, it's easy just to say a good pilot is always learning
and not always do it yourself.
You'll find that.
You'll spend so much time helping other learners learn that
you don't make time for yourself.
And, you have to make time for yourself,
and going back to reference those is a great thing.
So, that's briefly about you.
Let's now spend a little bit of time talking about
preparing your learners for checkrides.
Wow, that's a big thing.
And, then, CFIs, referring to CFIs for CFI checkrides or aspiring CFIs,
here's that old saying,
"Oh, your CFI wouldn't have signed you off if you weren't ready."
It's true.
No one's going to sign anyone off if they don't think they're ready.
No one wants to set someone up for failure.
No one's that evil.
By the way, CFIs, the FAA does look at our past fail rate.
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
It's some magical algorithm that you may get a knock on the door one day
if you have said amount of failures, and silly ones at that.
So, just watch and be mindful of that.
It's something you need to keep an eye on, most certainly.
And, of course, you're not going to set someone up for failure that,
"They're going to fail but let me sign them off, anyways."
It'll be a humbling experience.
That's not the right attitude, either, is it?
How do you prepare for this?
Here's the secret.
You don't prepare them for the checkride.
You prepare them to be a safe real-world pilot.
I am dead serious.
And, this goes against anything you've ever heard.
Don't prepare them for the checkride.
Prepare them to be a safe real-world pilot.
Yes, they need to do steep turns and slow flight and landings to the highest
and exceed any ACS guidelines,
but if you're just preparing them to nail their maneuvers,
preparing them to do a good fake cross-country,
because that's all it is, is you barely make it up and you go,
"Listen, they're going to divert you to this airport.
So, get ready," and you get--
Gosh, again, I reminisce back to my college days,
because we oftentimes have the same checkride examiner,
there was literally a gouge going around the school.
I went to a great school.
But, this is just human nature.
There was a gouge.
"Hey, he loves to ask questions about system,
so make sure you really know the aero systems.
He loves to talk about the aero fuel system,
so make sure you know it forwards and backwards."
You're preparing for a checkride at that point with a specific human.
I want to prepare to be a safe real-world pilot.
So, let me tell you something.
If you find yourself preparing for a particular examiner
or just preparing like,
"Hey, they're big, they're sticklers on this," or whatever,
you're missing the point.
The point is to make them safe when they're flying with their spouse,
with their kids, with their best friend,
or when there's 200 paying customers behind them.
That's what you're preparing them for.
Yes, everybody wants their learners to pass their knowledge test,
their written tests, to pass their checkrides,
but you do that through teaching real-world.
It's experienced-based learning.
Don't just teach them what's in the book.
Don't just teach them this rote memorization
of this big old FAR/AIM.
FAR/AIM is an awesome book, right?
We can thumb through it and everything else
and dog-ear it and tab it and highlight it, but if you don't understand it,
and then, more importantly, if you can't apply it,
if your learners can't apply it,
you're just teaching rote memorization at this point.
Real-world flying, team, that's a whole podcast in itself.
Please, remind me of this, that we need to do a whole--
And, we've been speaking about it a lot.
Last month, we spoke about it.
But, how do we share more about real-world flying?
That's what we want to work and focus on.
Let's wrap on this note here as well.
How do we, then--
what happens when we have our first CFI candidate?
Man, this is where you experience-share.
This is where you share on your mistakes, just like I'm doing here with you.
I am thankful someone screwed up.
I shared this on Tuesday, the story.
My old flight school, again, I was in a collegiate aviation program.
Everybody just shared CFI lesson plans.
And, I was coming up watching this happen.
And, eventually, the checkride examiner pulled everybody aside and said listen,
"I see the same lesson plans every single CFI checkride
and I'm failing every single person until I start seeing original
and unique CFI lesson plans."
Everyone would just share them.
No one was really learning anything.
I said, "Whoa, that's a wake-up call.
Good."
And, I was just starting my CFI.
I'm thinking, "Alright, this is awesome.
I'm glad this is happening now.
Good timing, because I can learn from this."
And, I plan on making my own lesson plans, anyways.
You can experience-share.
You can share your mistakes on becoming a CFI, your mistakes as a CFI.
And, most importantly,
you need to be a great listener and a great question-asker.
Help your learners dig deeper.
Four types of hypoxia, what do you mean?
You have to ask these kinds of questions that keep the learners talking.
When you are helping someone become a CFI,
you should do about 5% of the talking.
Really?
What do you mean?
What, we have that requirement?
Why?
A lot of why, a lot of what type questions.
Keep them talking.
Let them dig themselves into their own pitfalls, as we call them,
to show what they don't know and expand further and deeper on that.
Anyways,
listen, CFIs, you are the lifeblood of aviation.
I want to hire every single one of you.
I mean it.
It's outstanding.
Speaking of that, MZeroA, some fall 2021 hiring is my goal.
Be watching for that.
I mean it.
I'm not joking.
Seriously be watching for that.
So, MZeroA Nation, though, you are outstanding, you are a blessing.
Thank you so much for everything that you do.
If there is anything,
anything at all this week, this month, this year,
we can do for you or for your learners, please, please, please,
don't hesitate to reach out.
Have a blessed, amazing, outstanding rest of your day.
And most importantly, remember,
that a good pilot is always learning.
Have a great day, everyone. I'll see you.