Hello everyone,
Thanks for all the congrats. I don't anticipate that I will feel this degree of satisfaction with any future ratings or certificates. CFI really represents the start of a career for me.
To answer a few questions and give a little run down on the ride . . .
In my district you can definately take the CFI with certain DPEs. However, they charge 500 bucks and are probably tougher . . though much more efficient. It depends on the district. My area is too big to have the FSDO do all the Inital rides.
I started training for my CFI, before I started training for the commercial. My instructor had me become very familiar with the first 3 chapters in the AIH prior to starting our commercial training. I did all of my commercial from the right seat. What a huge benefit this was! My instructor made my CFI appointment on his cell phone right after I shut the engine down on my commercial checkride.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time writing lesson plans and topic outlines for the whole CFI PTS. I am still not too comfortable giving instruction, but I have been told that with this rating, the real learning begins after the checkride.
Yes, I took it with the FSDO. I had a really great inspector who, in my opinion, really could have been much harder on me. I'm sure that most local DEs would have been more thorough. That 10 hours is from the moment I showed up at the FSDO to the moment I left. Keep in mind that involved a 1 hour lunch break, a few other breaks along the way, and a whole lot of war stories (so to speak). The inspector had a lot of advice to share as far as "real-world" instructing goes. He also shared a lot of good stories about his balloon flying! His candidness surely helped relax me, but I was feeling very fatigued about half way through the flight.
He went really easy on FOI after commenting on my 100 on the written. (It's only 50 questions out of 200 possible, but I wasn't going to point that out) We discussed the HOT items in his eyes: endorsements, privileges of the inital CFI, aeromedical factors, proper use of the flight controls and the associated aerodynamics (adverse yaw, over banking, pitch vs. power vs. trim, why do we need rudder). We also discussed airworthiness requirements and did a cursory coverage of systems -- I was expecting more on these. He had me teach him two maneuver lessons. 8s on and then let me pick a performance maneuver. I chose steep turns (anyone else hate steep spirals??). He was pretty relaxed about these. I expected more of the oral to be pretending to be teaching, but I felt It was more like he wanted to know what I knew and then what I will teach my students about the subject.
So finally the flight. Only a couple of surprises. He gave me the full briefing so I knew ahead of time what he wanted. We did short field ops, normal ops, and then I was going to demonstrate a soft field when he chopped the power abeam and turned it into a 180. I'm just three weeks off my commercial in this same plane, so I made a very nice landing to make up for the (cough cough) not so precise normal landing. We did, MCA, power off stall, cross controlled demo, steep turns, chandelles, eights on, s turns, emergency approach. He opened my window during rotation . . that was cool. JUST fly the plane.
Like I said, I was feeling fatigued toward the end of the flight. He actually did a lot of the flying, but I could feel my self getting behind the plane. Luckily I sucked it up or atleast got lucky and didn't do anything to bone headed. I tried to talk a lot and say meaningful things. I'm still getting used to that though. All and all I have to say it's one of my proudest achievments.
Thanks for listening.
Mike
