Road to FI - Becoming a flight club instructor

Several months have passed since my previous exam sitting, and I’m still nowhere ready for the next sitting. I have watched a couple more BGS webinars, and renewed my Aviationexam subscription. I almost haven’t used it though, so that renewal was a bit of a waste.

I’m still working on it, and will eventually go for the next attempt - there’s just been to much else happening lately. I started a new job in January, in the Norwegian Air Sports Federation (Norges Luftsportforbund), and have been busy both at work and at home.

I have been doing a bit more flying, which has been great for the motivation. Going from 150 hours in the first 8-9 months of 2023 to 10 hours in the last months of 2023 and first of 2024 probably wasn’t the best way to stay motivated…

But most importantly, a couple days ago I started instructing in my local club! It’s easy to forget that I have been an instructor for a year already - I’m just limited to instructing for LAPL. And that’s exactly what I’ve started doing.

Could have done this a year ago

The only thing that was holding me back from doing this earlier, was that I hadn’t finished the club instructor standardization. And I intended to do that as soon as I had passed all of the CPL exams. The main reason being that we don’t have any LAPL students, so there wasn’t any point in doing it earlier.

Well, now we do. And maybe we could have had that earlier as well? LAPL is perfectly fine (and cheaper to maintain) for most recreational pilots in Europe, we’re just not very good at letting people know that.

I still plan to finish the CPL exams, and teach PPL (and VFR night) as well - but I’m still going to recommend LAPL to those that don’t have any goal of going the commercial route. LAPL is not a dead end anyway, as you can “upgrade” to PPL later if the need arises.

A quick flight to Sola and back

My club, Haugaland Flyklubb (Norwegian for flight club) doesn’t have its own DTO, we’re just a satellite base of the Sola Flyklubb (flight club) DTO. DTO is short for Declared Training Organization, a flight school in simpler words.

So to finish the standardization, I had to fly down to Sola (much more fun than driving) and take a standardization/test flight with the head of the flying school.

I had that flight scheduled for Monday this week, but the weather forecast didn’t look very promising. So when the option to go down last Saturday opened up, i just went for it. Normally I’m always nervous before any flight test/check, but I didn’t have time to be nervous this time - perfect!😂

Since our new club airplane, LN-BIH, has transponder issues, I had to take LN-HOG. An added benefit to that was that I have a considerable amount of right seat hours in LN-HOG now, and feel very comfortable on the right side. Flying from the right side is of course an important part of the standardization…

I’ve already got my first students

My first students are “LAPL conversion” students, from SPL TMG to LAPL(A). I took the other way myself a couple years ago, from PPL to SPL TMG. Having TMG experience myself does help a lot when teaching about the differences between a Super Dimona and a Cessna 172.

The road to the right seat has been a bit longer and different than I planned, but now I’m finally here! And it feels amazing!

Now I just have to let people know how awesome LAPL is for recreational pilots, and get me a couple ab initio students.

What’s next

I am in no way giving up on reaching my full goal - being able to instruct PPL and VFR night. But even another couple months of delays are better than facing a burnout. There’s still a lot of other things happening, and the exam center is closed during the summer. I have a (very supportive) family to take care of as well. So I might not be able to complete the exams until after the summer.

When I’m ready, I’m going to extend my subscriptions on the Bristol Groundschool’s BGS Video Library and Aviationexam once again, and continue where I left of.

Studying should be easier during the dark and cold season, but maybe it can be just as nice outside in the sun.

Flying with students are an excellent motivation - so I hope to be back studying soon!

• PPL
• Instruction