The Savvy Flight Instructor

You've mastered the FAA handbooks and wrapped up one of the toughest orals of your flying career. You can now fly and talk at the same time, all from the right seat. You can create lesson plans, enter mysterious endorsements in student logbooks, and actually explain the finer points of a lazy eight. That's everything you'll ever need to know in order to flight instruct…or is it?

This book is designed to help with all those "other" flight instructing questions, like why and how to become a CFI in the first place, and how to get your first instructing job. Where do flight students come from? And once you've got them, how do you keep them flying? How can you optimize your students' pass rate on checkrides? And how do you get flight customers to come back to you for their advanced ratings?

Written by Greg Brown (author of The Turbine Pilot's Flight Manual and Job Hunting for Pilots), this Second Edition of The Savvy Flight Instructor provides nearly 20 years of additional wisdom, experience, and know-how, and includes new "Finer Points" contributed by industry experts. While this edition retains the key marketing, pilot training, and customer support concepts that made the original edition required CFI reading, those areas have been refined and expanded to incorporate the latest industry philosophies and techniques.

Readers will learn how best to sell today's prospects on flying and how to utilize online marketing and social media. Greg Brown lays out tips for offering flight-instructing services with the sophistication of other competitive activities that beckon from just a click away on potential customers' computers and mobile devices. Aspiring flight instructors will learn why and how to qualify, and how to get hired once you earn the certificate. There's extensive coverage of techniques for systematizing customer success and satisfaction policies, strategies for pricing and structuring flight training to fit today's market, integration of affordable simulation technologies into your training programs, and tips for coping with the "CFI shortage."

Along with tips on how to attract and retain flight students, the author examines professionalism in flight instructing. In short, The Savvy Flight Instructor shows you how to use your instructing activities to increase student satisfaction, promote general aviation, and advance your personal flying career all at the same time.

Contributing writers in the new "Finer Points" sections are Heather Baldwin (a commercial pilot and marketing writer), and CFIs Jason Blair (a designated pilot examiner), Ben Eichelberger (a flight training standardization expert), Dorothy Schick (flight school owner and marketing innovator), and Ian Twombly (noted flight-training writer and editor).

Gregory N. Brown's love for flying is obvious in every section of this book, as is his concern for the image of the flight instructor and flight school: that they perform the best they can to seek out, promote, and sustain the joy of flight for the good of the entire industry.

In keeping with his role as general aviation advocate, Greg writes the "Flying Carpet" column in Flight Training magazine. He earned AOPA's 2013 Let's Go Flying Award recognizing the individual or organization that best demonstrates a passion and commitment to the future of general aviation, was named 2000 Industry/FAA National Flight Instructor of the Year, winner of the 1999 NATA Excellence in Pilot Training Award, and was designated the first-ever Master Flight Instructor.

A practitioner of the noble art of flight instructing since 1979, Greg has also piloted professionally in both scheduled and corporate aviation, and flown extensively for pleasure and personal business. He has entertained and educated aviation audiences as a speaker since 1990, including as presenter for NATA's acclaimed Flight School Business Success Seminars. An online forum host since the dawn of the Internet era, he currently hosts Greg Brown's Student Pilot Pep Talk group on Facebook.

Greg earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, including graduate work in human-factors cockpit design at the Aviation Research Laboratory. He also studied for two years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed several advanced flight ratings at Purdue University. He holds an ATP pilot certificate with Boeing 737 type rating, and a Flight Instructor certificate with all fixed-wing aircraft ratings including glider. Greg also holds Advanced and Instrument Ground Instructor ratings, and has been active as a pilot since 1971.

Other popular aviation books by Gregory N. Brown include The Turbine Pilot's Flight Manual, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane, Job Hunting for Pilots, and You Can Fly! He is also a noted aviation photographer.