Finding a good flight instructor

Recently decided to go for my private's license after all these years
of waiting for time and money.
But it seems like one has to just "hunt & peck" for a good instructor.
True?

How can you tell if an instructor has a good (or any) track record?
Does the FAA keep track of instructors' success rate?
Or is there somewhere online where one can find recommendations from
past students?

Is it really "buyer beware" ?
TIA
Janis

How can you tell if an instructor has a good (or any) track record?
Does the FAA keep track of instructors' success rate?

Well, yes and no. The FAA keeps track of how many students that have
been signed off pass their exam, and an instructor gets a "gold rating"
or something like that if enough students do this. However, offsetting
this, an instructor can just over-train before the checkride, so it's
not all that good an indicator, IMHO.

Talk to others who have flown with the instructor, and try a few
yourself. Each student's style is different, just like each
instructor's style is different.

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Janis Hidiki wrote:
How can you tell if an instructor has a good (or any) track record?

Talk to pilots in the area where you live. Ask them who they have had
lessons with and their opinion of their training.
If you keep hearing one or two names as being good, get their telephone
numbers and contact them.

Janis Hidiki wrote:
Recently decided to go for my private's license after all these years
of waiting for time and money.
But it seems like one has to just "hunt & peck" for a good instructor.
True?

How can you tell if an instructor has a good (or any) track record?
Does the FAA keep track of instructors' success rate?
Or is there somewhere online where one can find recommendations from
past students?

Try to find the DE that serves your area and call him or her. Often
they will tell you who sends them the best prepared students.

Matt

This will help follow up on Matt's suggestion:

http://av-info.faa.gov/DesigneeSearch.asp

Bob Gardner

"Janis Hidiki" wrote in message
oups.com...
Recently decided to go for my private's license after all these years
of waiting for time and money.
But it seems like one has to just "hunt & peck" for a good instructor.
True?

How can you tell if an instructor has a good (or any) track record?
Does the FAA keep track of instructors' success rate?
Or is there somewhere online where one can find recommendations from
past students?

Is it really "buyer beware" ?
TIA
Janis

Is it really "buyer beware" ?

It is to a large extent. Having a flight instructor certificate
assures a certain minimum standard, but it's very minimal.

The best advice I can give you is this - figure out the sort of pilot
you want to be in five or ten years (meet the pilots based at your
airport to get an idea) and then ask THAT pilot to choose your
instructor. He already has a pretty good idea of what to look for -
you don't.

It's a matter of perspective. By the time you've figured out how to
choose a good instructor, it's not so useful.

Michael

(reply crossposted to rec.aviation.student)

Michael's post is spot on. Personal recommendations are the only way to
go. I asked a similar question a year ago and got mostly similar
answers about interviewing a bunch of instructors etc, but I didn't find
that advice helpful. Has anyone here actually tried it? I'm sure it
can be pulled off by a sufficiently charismatic person, but for me it
felt socially awkward in the extreme. Also, if you're looking for that
elusive retired guy teaching for the love of it, you're not going to
find him/her in the yellow pages.

I went through three instructors in my first three hours (two greenhorn
time-builders and a crotchety guy who couldn't teach), decided at over
$100 a shot I was throwing away my money, and quit. A year and a half
later on a whim I sent an e-mail in the blind to the author of an online
aviation site (a nuclear physicist by trade) asking if he by chance knew
an instructor in my area he could personally recommend. He said no but
passed me on to a local pilot/acro instructor in the area (himself a
nationally prominent professor of computer science by trade) who in turn
recommended a woman who is actually a flight instructor by trade. It
turns out she is excellent, and one of her two greenhorn apprentices is
not bad at all, and I'm doing a much better job of learning with them.
(Elaine Heston, Aeroexecutive Services, inc. at Rostraver Airport south
of Pittsburgh, 724-379-4722)

It turns out if I had asked around the local EAA chapter I would have
found the same woman as half of them are her students, but the couple
local pilots I knew at the time didn't have any personal recommendations
to make.

So, to sum up, the approach that worked for me was to first find a
prominent local pilot (or group) well keyed-in to the local instructor
scene, and ask that person or people for personal recommendations. The
hard problem is not comparing the instructors you find against each
other, but rather finding any instructor at all who stands out as good.
Certainly blowing a couple hundred dollars on bad instructors helped
me to recognize a keeper....

~Adam

Michael wrote:
Is it really "buyer beware" ?


It is to a large extent. Having a flight instructor certificate
assures a certain minimum standard, but it's very minimal.

The best advice I can give you is this - figure out the sort of pilot
you want to be in five or ten years (meet the pilots based at your
airport to get an idea) and then ask THAT pilot to choose your
instructor. He already has a pretty good idea of what to look for -
you don't.

It's a matter of perspective. By the time you've figured out how to
choose a good instructor, it's not so useful.

Michael

After 15 hours of instruction I got a new job and moved to the next
State. I had no contacts in the city, but I knew where I could find
knowledgeable local pilots: the local EAA chapter.

I found their website, called the membership contact, and was heartily
welcomed to a meeting. There I met a group of wonderful people who
gave me a wealth of information of the local aviation scene, and I was
ultimately directed to a great instructor.

My advice for those seeking a great CFI is to join your local EAA
chapter and tap into that knowledge base.

GWP

I tried that and the CFI I was given did not want anything to do with sport
pilots at all...NONE ZILCH NADA! HAHAHAHA I was amazed to find an EAA guy
so against the sport pilot rules.

Patrick
student SPL
aircraft structural mech

"greenwavepilot" wrote in message
ups.com...
After 15 hours of instruction I got a new job and moved to the next
State. I had no contacts in the city, but I knew where I could find
knowledgeable local pilots: the local EAA chapter.

I found their website, called the membership contact, and was heartily
welcomed to a meeting. There I met a group of wonderful people who
gave me a wealth of information of the local aviation scene, and I was
ultimately directed to a great instructor.

My advice for those seeking a great CFI is to join your local EAA
chapter and tap into that knowledge base.

GWP

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005 16:38:26 -0400, "W P Dixon"
wrote:

I tried that and the CFI I was given did not want anything to do with sport
pilots at all...NONE ZILCH NADA! HAHAHAHA I was amazed to find an EAA guy
so against the sport pilot rules.

Patrick
student SPL
aircraft structural mech

With the sport pilot license being so new, it would not surprise me at
all to find out that there are a lot of instructors out there that
have very little knowledge of the reqs. And because of their lack of
knowledge, they may resist teaching it because they are unfamiliar
with it. That is just human nature to resist something new. I will
be the first to admit that as an instructor (though not an active on
seeking students) I am not comfortable with it. I am a member of NAFI
and I have read several articles about it but because I have never had
a student or even anyone come to me, I would have to do a lot of
reading about it to make sure that I didn't misinterpret the regs so
not to do the student wrong.


Scott D.