Diamondhead Aviator

by PaUl GilbErT aviatorandwriter@gmail.com

We often hear the old saying, “A good pilot is always learning”. I agree one hundred percent.

AOPA’s Flight Training magazine is a great source for many informative training articles. Reading through the magazine, I find articles that cover a topic I either haven’t thought about in a long time or things have changed so much that I need to learn about the changes.

One article in last month’s Flight Training magazine brought up a very important topic of an unqualified instructor giving a flight review in a multi-engine aircraft. As a young flight instructor in the early 90’s, I was presented with a few ethical challenges to include a fellow instructor asking me to give a solo sign off to a student I had never flown with. Another time, someone asked me to sign them off for a flight review without flying with them. Their flight review was due but they had to make a trip the next day and needed to be legal. As far as they were concerned, ‘legal’ just meant my endorsement in their logbook. Neither got the requested endorsements.

As flight instructors, we assume a huge responsibility (and liability) every time we place an endorsement in someone’s logbook. To be quite blunt, after an accident, the pilot’s logbooks are scrutinized for landing currency, most recent flight review, check ride for a new certificate or rating or any other event that satisfies FAR 61.56 which covers flight reviews.

The signatures we place in the logbooks of others must not be taken lightly as they are considered legal documents.

Be sure your instructor is qualified, current and legal

In the magazine article, a pilot discovered his flight review was not valid. He had done the flight portion of the review in a multi-engine aircraft but his instructor was not a multi-engine instructor, and wasn’t even rated to fly multi-engine aircraft.

In a previous article, I wrote about the importance of interviewing an instructor before actually flying with them. The point of that article was to learn about the instructor’s teaching style, personality type and where they are in their career path, so you don’t have to find another instructor in three months because yours took an airline job.

I didn’t mention making sure that instructor is qualified to teach in the type aircraft you’ll be using. The average student starts flying a single engine land airplane with a tricycle landing gear.

But what if you want to learn to fly a conventional gear aircraft, or tail dragger? Or you want to fly a seaplane, helicopter, glider or a multi-engine airplane?

Want to get your instrument rating? Your instructor must be an instrument instructor for the training to count toward the requirements for the practical test.

Of course, a competent instructor should know their limitations and advise a potential student if they are unable to instruct for a particular rating, certificate or type. But it never hurts to ask.

The article didn’t say if the instructor knew what they were doing was illegal or not. The Federal Aviation Regulations can be a maze of legal terms and paragraph references. Some questions of legality come down to interpretation and each FSDO may have a slightly different interpretation, but just being multi-engine rated doesn’t qualify a person with just a single engine CFI to teach in twins and that includes the flight review.

BasicMed has been a great addition to the medical certification system. But it’s important to know the limitations of the program. Besides being limited to six thousand pound gross weight, five passengers and other limitations, a pilot using BasicMed cannot fly for compensation or hire. This means an instructor cannot give primary flight instruction if flying under BasicMed. Advanced ratings such as the instrument rating or commercial certificate can be done since the student is already able to act as PIC of that aircraft and the instructor can teach without any medical at all. But the bottom line is an instructor cannot fly for compensation or hire while operating under BasicMed. The result of this would be, just like the pilot in the article, your flight time with that instructor would be invalid.

The regulations state in FAR 91.3 that the pilot in command is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. From the first few flights, a pilot should start determining the legality of each flight. Is the aircraft airworthy? Is the pilot current and qualified? Part of that legality question should be to ensure the flight instructor sitting next to you is current and qualified as well.