CFIs now have access to multiple tools, courses and programs to teach, recruit new students and run their businesses.
For Immediate Release: March 30, 2023, SUN ‘N FUN, Lakeland FL.
As a flight instructor, you want to keep tabs on your students’ progress. You can see in the cockpit how they’re handling the airplane, but you can’t look inside their heads to gauge the progress of their aeronautical knowledge. You’re never quite sure how they’ll do when it comes time for the written tests.
That’s about to change.
King Schools’ new Flight Instructor Program is designed to allow instructors to track their students’ progress through King Schools courses. The CFI Program provides CFIs with a dashboard that links them and their students. An instructor can invite a student to link up, or the student can invite the instructor. Either way, CFIs gain access to the progress their students are making as they work their way through their King Schools courses. CFIs will be able to see the topics students have covered, which ones gave them trouble, and how they performed on the quizzes at the end of each section. With those insights, instructors can shape their own curriculum to best meet the students’ needs. There’s a double benefit: Instructors not only learn the strengths and weaknesses of individual students, but can also identify which areas in their own teaching are working well and which ones need more emphasis or a different approach.
Participating instructors also receive a free suite of King Schools courses, from Private Pilot through Flight Instructor. These are the same courses their students are taking and can be used to review subjects or to watch videos and work through questions together, including using the included KING Flashcard App to quickly quiz and assess their students’ knowledge. To make things even easier, courses can be downloaded to an instructor’s iPad or iPhone and viewed even when offline.
Flight Instructors can also use a newly created course, Your First Flying Lesson, to recruit individuals with a budding interest in becoming a pilot. The course is provided free to flight training candidates and follows a flight in a Cessna 172 from San Diego to Catalina Island, beginning with the preflight inspection and ending with lunch at the Airport in the Sky. Your First Flying Lesson is designed to help alleviate the anxieties of prospective students and show them what they will experience when they take to the air. It emphasizes the fun and freedom of flying, while introducing the newcomer to basic knowledge about the airplane’s systems and behavior. It is designed to show that piloting an airplane, while challenging, is fun and empowering as well.
Lastly, CFIs and Flight School owners, who are entrepreneurs themselves, can learn a lot from the Kings’ new book LIFT: How to Start, Run and Grow Your Own Successful Business. Since they began in 1979 as traveling ground school instructors, John and Martha King have built a thriving business and have taught more pilots than anyone else in history. The lessons they learned along the way are the subject of LIFT, and CFIs, as teachers or entrepreneurs or both, will appreciate the practical tools the Kings provide for creating their own business success.
For more information about each of these initiatives, please visit the following websites:
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