It’s one of those approaches that even professional pilots dread: Mountainous airport at night with gusty winds and weather nearly to minimums. Frank, the captain of the Cessna Citation X, is not terribly worried as he’s been through this drill before. It’s his fifth approach to the airport in the soup, and he has it under control. But just past the inner approach fix, the engine fan speed begins to drop and seconds later the LO OIL PRESS L and MASTER WARNING indicators flash. Jeremy, the second-in-command, starts calling out the engine shutdown and engine failure during final-approach procedures while Frank performs and confirms each step, trying to keep the airplane from losing altitude among the tall Colorado mountains.
When it’s all over and the wheels of the Citation touch the ground, Jeremy lets out an audible sigh of relief before calling out the touchdown procedure. As the airspeed bleeds off and it becomes obvious the jet will make the turnoff, the scene outside the windshield freezes and engine noise suddenly ceases. Frank and Jeremy have completed their recurrent checkride in a FlightSafety International (FSI) Level D simulator. But Frank and Jeremy aren’t FSI customers; they’re instructors finishing up their recurrent training.
“Regardless of whether an airplane requires a type rating or not, our instructors teaching in that aircraft go through the same initial and recurrent training that our clients do,” says Richard Meikle, FlightSafety Executive Vice President of Operations and Safety.
Instructors: FlightSafety’s Backbone
FlightSafety, which Albert Ueltschi founded in 1951 to provide airline-level training to corporate pilots, has since expanded its focus to maintenance technicians, cabin attendants, and other aviation professionals. Throughout its more than 70 years of existence, FSI has continuously invested in technology to produce higher fidelity simulators, but it has not forgotten that instructors are still the key to making learning happen.
“One of the things that FlightSafety does exceptionally well is to attract and retain highly qualified talent,” says Doug May, FlightSafety Executive Vice President of Operations and Courseware, who served as an, engineer,flight test pilot or executive at Bombardier, Cessna, Bell Helicopter, and Textron Aviation before joining FSI. “Our instructors are well-versed in the aircraft that they’re teaching from military, corporate, or even flight test experience they’ve had prior to coming to FlightSafety. Their breadth of experience is one of the differentiators that sets FlightSafety apart from other training companies.”
FlightSafety employs more than 1,600 instructors worldwide, with 93 percent serving as fixed-wing flight or maintenance instructors and the remainder in rotorcraft. Most FSI instructors become specialists in one or two aircraft, keeping up with model changes to teach “differences” courses as well as initial and recurrent training.
FlightSafety sets high standards for hiring instructors, including an unrestricted ATP certificate or at least one unrestricted PIC type rating with a minimum of 2,500 hours of total flight time. That’s just the beginning, though. The first three to four months on the job are spent training in various aspects of being an instructor, from learning how FlightSafety conducts training to completing multiple initial and recurrent courses.
“Teaching at FlightSafety turns generalists into specialists,” says Meikle. “A flight instructor at a typical flight school teaches the general concepts of how to be a pilot: manipulating the flight controls, the basics of navigation, etc. They could train in a Cessna 172 one day and a Piper Cherokee the next. But our instructors are specialists—they teach the nuances of a specific airplane to a master’s level. So, they have to know the airplane at a Ph.D. level. Our flight instructors are considered experts in their field.”
Steve Watkins has been an instructor pilot at FlightSafety since 2001. “I think one of the nice things about FlightSafety is that we don’t have people just from the airlines, the military, or the private sector,” Watkins said in a video posted during FSI Instructor Week 2023. “Our instructors come from all phases of aviation. You get such a culmination of that vast knowledge and when they’re able to pass on that expertise to another pilot, that’s invaluable. I get to work with some of the best pilots in the world.”
Just Because It Doesn’t Leave the Ground Doesn’t Mean the Sim’s Easy
FlightSafety instructors must enjoy challenges. After all, they’re tasked with teaching people who already know how to fly and are often quite familiar with the aircraft. Many FSI instructors agree that recurrent training is the hardest to provide as the instructors must be able to explain the anomalies that students are seeing in the field.
“Our instructors are incessantly getting grilled, although it’s not in a malicious way,” says May. “But if both the instructor and student have significant experience with the topic they’re discussing, the level of conversation they can have will be very different than it’d be if one of them were new to the topic. Many of our clients are well-versed in the aircraft and want to learn more, for example, about how one inoperative system might affect other aircraft systems. Instructors are essentially being tested all the time.”
Since FSI courses run from a few days to a few weeks, one might think instructors would get tired of teaching the same material over and over. But Meikle says the opposite occurs: each new set of students brings new challenges and keeps instructors motivated.
“While each session is based on the same set of materials, every class is different because the clients have different backgrounds and experience levels,” Meikle says. “Clients relatively new to the aircraft will ask different questions than people who have been flying it for some time and have seen a lot of anomalies. Those conversations are powerful learning opportunities.”
While it’s true that the simulator instructor can press pause and reset when things get dicey, simulator training presents its own set of challenges for the instructor. In addition to knowing the aircraft systems, the instructor must know how to run the simulator. But just as a good pilot must understand aircraft systems, simulator instructors need to understand the simulator systems and be able to tell whether something going wrong is an aircraft system response or a simulator system response.
“The simulator instructor also has to manage the weather, air traffic control services, airfield lighting, etc.,” May says. “It takes a fair amount of skill to control all that seamlessly without clients feeling like they’re in a simulator. A skilled instructor will create such a realistic scenario that you’ll walk out of the simulator sweating.”
Teaching in the simulator can also be more demanding because of the concentrated and more focused learning environment. “The simulator provides the ability for almost nonstop instruction during the session by continuously setting up scenarios exactly where you need to focus rather than flying to a spot and then teaching,” May says.
Instructors Have Opportunities To Grow at FSI
FlightSafety instructors often have access to OEM documentation and experts that the casual pilot may not have, especially when an OEM is developing a new aircraft model. Often, FSI instructors work closely with OEM engineers and flight test personnel to ensure that simulators will replicate the flight characteristics of the aircraft as closely as possible. For example, FlightSafety had two simulators built and the curriculum ready by March 2023 for the Gulfstream 700, which is scheduled to receive FAA certification in mid-2023.
“The Falcon 10X is another example of FSI/OEM cooperation that will result in training availability coinciding with the aircraft’s anticipated entry to service in 2025,” May says. “Joint teams are already developing the simulators and training content. As the aircraft design matures, so will the simulator and the courseware. The instructors will be ready to teach in the Falcon 10X simulators even before the aircraft is certified.”
Due to FSI’s partnership with GE Digital, FSI instructors also have the unique opportunity to use quality assurance data from more than 300 flight departments and 1,200 aircraft to tailor training to address safety issues.
“We don’t see individual data—we only see aggregated data—but it helps us to identify issues out in the field that we can address in the training,” says Meikle. “We have great insight to aggregated crew behavior as it relates to runway excursion threats such as instability on final, etc., based on the GE Digital data, and that allows us to drive the training to address things causing instability that may be pilot-induced. For example, we’re seeing pilots driven by ATC requests to maintain a higher speed to the initial approach fix marker become unstable as they try to slow the aircraft down in a shorter time frame. So now we can discuss this in training and help pilots make better decisions so they don’t have an excursion and find themselves sitting in the aircraft off the end of the runway thinking, ‘I wish I would have gone around.’”
FlightSafety instructors also have myriad opportunities to grow within the company’s qualification system. Typically, a new instructor becomes qualified to teach initial training on a particular aircraft. The next step would be to qualify to teach recurrent courses in the aircraft, and finally to become an examiner. After that, instructors often become qualified to teach courses per EASA standards or for other national aviation authorities.
“FlightSafety is a great place for instructors to work because we provide the support, the resources, the dedication, and the commitment to safety that allow instructors to grow and make a difference,” May says. “And this is a job where you can say, ‘I made a difference in somebody’s life today.’”