Flight Instructor Rating

The flight instructor course is an intense 8-week course designed to develop a pilot's ability to teach principles of flying training to students, as well as to further fine-tune their own commercial flying ability. The course consists of a series of briefs conducted by, and supervised by a senior instructor which cover basic principles such as effects of controls, to more advanced topics such as night navigation and basic instrument flying. In addition to the briefing component, each candidate must cover 50 hours flight time of which 30 hours is dual with a senior instructor, and 20 hours mutual as pilot-in-command with a fellow candidate in one of the company's fleet of aircraft.

As well as addressing the technical side to instruction, the course also addresses perhaps more importantly, the psychological aspect of instruction involving the learning processes and how personalities and attitudes can affect one's learning processes- principles which are used in instructional techniques universally, not just with flight training.

Upon completion of the instructor course, the graduate usually finds employment with the flying school where they can begin their professional pilot career. In order to be eligible to enrol in the flight instructor course, the candidate must hold a current class 1 medical and valid commercial pilots licence, as well as hold either an instrument rating or night VFR rating.