The Savvy Flight Instructor: Secrets of the Successful CFI

by Gregory N. Brown

You've mastered the FAA handbooks and wrapped up one of the toughest orals of your flying career. You can now fly and talk at the same time, all from the right seat. You can create lesson plans, enter mysterious endorsements in student logbooks, and actually explain the finer points of a lazy eight. That's everything you'll ever need to know in order to flight instruct…or is it?

This book is designed to help with all those “other” flight instructing questions, like why and how to become a CFI in the first place, and how to get your first instructing job. Where do flight students come from? And once you've got them, how do you keep them flying? How can you optimize your students' pass rate on checkrides? And how do you get flight customers to come back to you for their advanced ratings?

Written by Greg Brown (author of The Turbine Pilot's Flight Manual and Job Hunting for Pilots), this Second Edition of The Savvy Flight Instructor provides nearly 20 years of additional wisdom, experience, and know-how, and includes new “Finer Points” contributed by industry experts. While this edition retains the key marketing, pilot training, and customer support concepts that made the original edition required CFI reading, those areas have been refined and expanded to incorporate the latest industry philosophies and techniques.

Readers will learn how best to sell today's prospects on flying and how to utilize online marketing and social media. Greg Brown lays out tips for offering flight-instructing services with the sophistication of other competitive activities that beckon from just a click away on potential customers' computers and mobile devices. Aspiring flight instructors will learn why and how to qualify, and how to get hired once you earn the certificate. There's extensive coverage of techniques for systematizing customer success and satisfaction policies, strategies for pricing and structuring flight training to fit today's market, integration of affordable simulation technologies into your training programs, and tips for coping with the “CFI shortage.”

Along with tips on how to attract and retain flight students, the author examines professionalism in flight instructing. In short, The Savvy Flight Instructor shows you how to use your instructing activities to increase student satisfaction, promote general aviation, and advance your personal flying career all at the same time.

Contributing writers in the new "Finer Points" sections are Heather Baldwin (a commercial pilot and marketing writer), and CFIs Jason Blair (a designated pilot examiner), Ben Eichelberger (a flight training standardization expert), Dorothy Schick (flight school owner and marketing innovator), and Ian Twombly (noted flight-training writer and editor).

Genres: Aviation

430 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1997

Reviews

[Andris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book sharing the business/people best practices of flight instructing. Greg's writing style is clear & fun, and it reads quickly (unlike the FAA Aviation Instructors Handbook!).