Not going to lie, it felt weird beginning my last semester as an undergraduate student here at ERAU. Time went by faster than I could have ever imagined. Three plus years later, I have had experiences and made friendships that I could have scarcely imagined prior to actually attending. Nevertheless I digress, onward to bigger and better things!
The beginning of January did not only mark the beginning of classes, but the beginning of CFI New Hire class as well. This month the Embry-Riddle Flight Line hired a total of five new instructors, myself included. Having gone through a new hire ground school with Cape Air in the fall of 2013, I felt myself feeling prepared for what lay ahead. The key to any ground school, whether it is with a new company or even classes here at school, is to always get ahead. The instructors usually send out the material they will be referencing in class in an email prior to the school’s actual start date. In this case, with Embry-Riddle, we had about 3 weeks to study up.
Having used some of Christmas Break to brush up on details I may have forgotten, I walked into the new hire with excitement. Overall, the ground school was broken up into two pieces. The first piece was more administrative stuff, policies and procedures for example. As a student pilot over the last three years, I have become familiar with the policies concerning the students. As I transition to a flight instructor, now I have to learn the policies influencing instructors on a daily basis. The big ones include how to schedule your students on ETA (our scheduling software), and of course duty time restrictions. If you reference 14 C.F.R. Part 61.195, you will see we instructors have laws restricting us on how long we can actually work. Furthermore, the flight line has more rules.
The second part of the ground school was all about the FUNDAMENTALS! 
If there is one topic that was most certainly drilled into our heads it is the fundamentals. When I reference the fundamentals I mean straight and level flight, climbs, descents, and turns. These four aspects, or a combination thereof, make up all of the flight maneuvers you will learn throughout your training. We as pilots cannot continue to make progress if we do not have the fundamental foundation to move forward. Therefore, the fundamentals played a huge part in our ground school and will continue to do so for the actual flight training we conduct.
With the successful completion of CFI New Hire Ground School as of last Friday, here’s to the successful completion of new hire flight training. Hopefully, within the next few weeks I will begin to receive students. If you remember my earlier blog, I talked about time management. Being enrolled in classes, traveling for admissions, and now teaching actual flight students will be the culmination of time management as my time here at ERAU, as a student, begins to come to a close.
More to come, talk to you all soon!
