The instructors knew we could expect a full day of flying when we walked into the flight school in the morning and found a bottle of water and a granola bar on our desks.
This was the dispatcher’s way of letting us know the schedule was booked solid with back-to-back flights all day. What inevitably followed was the verbal warning to watch the Hobbs time carefully so you did not violate cFAR §61.195—Flight Instructor limitation and qualifications (a) Hours of training: In any 24-consecutive-hour period a flight instructor may not conduct more than eight hours of flight training.
Although it may appear that a flight instructor works around the clock and is at the airport 24/7—especially when they are in a rush to build hours—there is a limit to how much of that instruction can take place in an aircraft in a 24-hour period.
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When a flight school is busy, there can be a lot of juggling to make sure that no CFI overflies the eight hours. Sometimes another CFI who still has “time on their clock” is pressed into service to cover a flight, or schedules are adjusted to make sure the customers’ needs are met as well.
It is important that the person doing the scheduling knows the qualifications of each instructor so they don’t accidentally put an unqualified instructor with a client—for example, pairing an instructor who lacks a multi-engine instructor rating with a multi-engine client.
For the newly certified instructors, it can come as a surprise to learn there is an endurance building phase of being a CFI. The noise and vibration and exposure to the elements take their toll. You may remember this from your student pilot days. Those first few hours were fatiguing, and your savvy instructor carefully watched you for signs of fatigue and knew when to head back to the airport.
Many flight schools ease the freshly minted CFIs onto the schedule. You may start out doing flight reviews, or being with one or two clients at first, and balance out the rest of the time teaching a ground school or seminar. As your experience and endurance build, you pick up more clients and flight time.
‘F’ in IMSAFE
All pilots learn to run the IMSAFE checklist before a flight. It addresses the pilot’s fitness for flight focusing on illness, medication, stress, alcohol, fatigue, and emotion. You probably wouldn’t let a client fly fatigued—nor should you.
Flight instruction is much more than sitting in the cockpit. There is the preflight and postflight briefing and paperwork to keep student records up to date. You do not want to do the latter when fatigued because that’s where mistakes creep in. Fatigue takes its toll, and just like a well-trained instructor watches their clients for signs of it, you need to know your own tells as well and respect them.
Dehydration often presents as fatigue. Keep a bottle of water within reach in the cockpit. Better yet, have one for you and the client. Part of being a CFI is modeling good behavior, and the importance of staying hydrated while flying is part of that.
Nutrition is critical to maintaining energy. Focus on balanced meals or snacks if that is all time permits, along with staying properly hydrated. You can exist on energy drinks and candy bars for a short time, but it will catch up to you.
Night flights present a particular challenge because at the end of a long day we naturally want to sleep, and if you have a night flight to do, you may be fighting against the clock. It is common practice to plan night flights around the full moon and adjust the instructor schedules accordingly, or to have an instructor who comes in later in the day handle the night flights.
Fatigue doesn’t wait for the sun to go down. It seems like every flight school and a great many student pilots have a story about a CFI who fell asleep during a lesson. It can be very frightening for the student pilots.
I know, because it happened to me as a very inexperienced student pilot. My instructor was a retired airline pilot who learned to fly during World War II. He was in his 70s and very skilled. Flight instruction was a retirement job for him.
On a routine flight on a warm day he nodded off. It was late in the day, and he had been flying since sunup. We were in cruise flight in the Cessna 152 when I asked him a question, and he did not reply, causing me to look over at him. His head down on his chest, he was out cold. I repeated my question—no response, so I nudged him—again, no response. I stuck out my left wrist so the face of my watch was under his nose. I was greatly relieved when it fogged up. A few more aggressive nudges brought him around.
Multiple Job Shuffle
As most flight instructor jobs do not pay enough to live on, many CFIs have side gigs.
Be careful when working multiple jobs. If you’ve just put in a full day at (insert non-aviation job here), are you really going to have the energy, both mental and physical, to be a safe and competent pilot?
Be cautious and conservative. You owe it to yourself and your clients to bring your best to the cockpit every time so that learning can take place.