CFI And CFII Training

Almost nobody adds an instructor rating because they wanted another certificate. They add it because it is the one job in aviation that pays you to log the hours you still need. A commercial certificate can be finished at around 250 hours; an airline transport pilot certificate asks for 1,500, with lower figures — 1,250, 1,000 and 750 — for particular associate degree, aviation degree and military routes. Instructing is how most people cross that gap without buying the aircraft time out of their own pocket.

It is paid by the flight hour rather than as a salary. Here that is $35 an hour of flight instruction, so what you earn follows what you actually fly: the weather, the daylight, and how many students a school has on its books. That is worth knowing before you commit the ground hours, and worth setting against the hours themselves — a hundred hours instructed is a hundred hours you were paid for instead of a hundred you bought at $120. The other half of the return is harder to price — teaching a manoeuvre to somebody who has never flown it makes you better at flying it than any amount of practising alone.

The initial CFI is not a flying course with a teaching component bolted on. It is a teaching qualification that happens to be assessed in an aircraft. You will spend far more hours at a table than in the air — that is why the estimate is 40 hours of ground against 10 of flight — and the checkride is famously long, mostly oral, and mostly about whether you can explain a subject to somebody who does not know it yet.

The parts that catch people out are the fundamentals of instruction, teaching from the right seat, and being able to talk continuously while flying accurately. We drill all three.

Before the checkride there are written exams, and the initial CFI has two of them. They are booked, paid for and sat by you at an FAA-approved testing centre rather than arranged by us, and they are the part candidates most often leave until the ground work is already finished. Sit them early: a result in hand is what lets the ground sessions be about teaching rather than about revision.

• Fundamentals of Instructing, with narrow exemptions in Part 61 for people who already hold a teaching credential.
• Flight Instructor Airplane, the subject-matter exam for the initial rating.
• Flight Instructor Instrument, added when you go on to the CFII.
• Part 61 also asks that you be at least 18 and able to read, speak and understand English.

The initial CFI calls for spin training and a spin endorsement, flown in an aircraft approved for spins. Ask us early and we will name the provider we send candidates to, so you can book it alongside your ground work rather than at the end.

Bring the endorsement back and it slots straight into your training here — it is a normal part of the plan, and we build your schedule around it.

There is no honest single number, and the academies advertising a fortnight are answering a different question — they are quoting the length of a residential course, not the length of your preparation. The flying is the small part: the plan here is 10 hours in the air against 25 on the ground.

What sets your calendar is the three things sitting outside those hours — passing the written exams, booking the spin endorsement with the provider we name, and getting comfortable enough to teach a subject out loud rather than recite it. Flying runs seven days a week, 7am to 7pm, so the schedule is rarely the constraint. Tell us what you already hold and when you last flew, and we will put dates against it instead of a slogan.

We are always glad to talk through instructing here when capacity comes up.

Either way we will be straightforward with you about what instructing is really like — the hours, the money, the weather, and what teaching does for your own flying.

A flight instructor certificate is not something you hold for life. It runs for 24 calendar months and then has to be renewed — through a flight instructor refresher course, through a record of activity and checkride pass rate, or through a reinstatement check. Almost nobody is warned about that until the first expiry is close.

The two ratings that follow both widen what you are allowed to teach. The CFII lets you take instrument students, which is the difference between teaching when the weather is good and teaching most of the year. The MEI is flown here in the school’s Piper PA-44 Seminole, so adding it does not mean changing schools.

Both figures exclude the examiner’s fee. They are planning estimates rather than guaranteed package prices, and the ground hours in particular vary enormously: how long the initial CFI takes depends on how comfortable you are explaining things out loud. Prices last updated August 13, 2026.

Denis Vyatkin, who owns the school and oversees the instructor certificates, and Sergio, who teaches most primary students.