Certified Flight Instructor — Airplane (CFI)

About this course

Earning your CFI is the single biggest shift in any pilot's career: you stop flying for yourself and start flying for your students. This course rebuilds your knowledge from the instructor's chair. You already know how to fly the airplane — now you must learn how to **teach** it, how to diagnose a struggling student, how to manage the risk of a person who does not yet know what they do not know, and how to document training so it stands up to FAA scrutiny. We begin with the **Fundamentals of Instructing (FOI)** — the human-learning theory that underpins the entire certificate and the FOI knowledge test. From there we move into the regulatory framework that governs instructors, the structure of effective ground and flight lessons, the assessment and endorsement system, and single-pilot/aeronautical decision-making taught from the right seat. The back half of the course is a maneuver-by-maneuver teaching guide covering the full Private and Commercial airplane ACS: how to demonstrate each maneuver, the common errors students make, the underlying aerodynamics, and the completion standards you will sign your name to. This is an **ADVANCED** course written for certificated commercial pilots preparing for the CFI initial practical test. It assumes you can already perform the maneuvers; its job is to make you able to explain, demonstrate, diagnose, and endorse. Plan on roughly 30 hours of focused study, plus the flight training you will do with a CFI instructor.

What you'll learn

Summary