It’s another aviation entry, so if you find this stuff boring, I guess you can go back to not being awesome.
I passed my CFI checkride on March 27, thus ending (or maybe just prolonging) the longest and most difficult period of studying and knowledge absorption of my life. The questions I am constantly answering now is “When are you going to be a commercial pilot?” and “So does this mean you can fly wherever you want now?”

I’ll do a not-so-quick super-general overview of the ratings you can get as a pilot in the most common order you will see them. If you are a pilot and I don’t get too specific with the descriptions, please don’t try to cite regulations and point out where I am technically incorrect. As of now, you probably don’t want to go toe to toe with me on Federal Aviation Regulations as I have still not gotten drunk enough to forget them and may smoke you with my voluminous knowledge. I’m making this simple so people who don’t fly can have a better understanding and can ask relevant questions to people who fly.

First, you’re a Student Pilot – this means you are being taught to fly by a Certified Flight Instructor (CFI). You may be allowed to fly solo, but you can’t carry passengers and you have a bunch of other restrictions until you pass your first checkride, which is the…

Private Pilot – this means you are qualified to safely drive a single engine airplane. You can also get a multi-engine private pilot rating, which means you can fly multi-engine airplanes up to a certain weight. If you are a private pilot, you can fly wherever you want (as long as you aren’t getting paid to fly), with passengers, day or night (assuming the weather is clear and you follow all of the rules that apply to you). If you decide you want to fly in the clouds, you’ll need an…

Instrument Rating – This means you have been found competent to fly your airplane without any outside references (yes, when you are in a jet and you can’t see out the window, the pilots can’t either), and you can safely depart, navigate, and land in whatever weather you are dumb enough to fly through. The rating that (usually) comes next is the…

Commercial Pilot – This does not mean you fly a 737. You can get a commercial rating in a single engine Cessna or a twin Comanche or whatever you want. All a commercial rating really means is that you can legally be paid to fly. You have to do certain maneuvers to stricter standards and have a deeper knowledge of all relevant subjects that apply to the aircraft and type of flying you are doing. If you are a true glutton for punishment, you can decide to be a…

Certified Flight Instructor – this is the checkride I finished on the 27th, and contrary to popular belief, the bitch of it all is not the test itself, but the billion hours of study and practice that is required to prepare for the ride.

Here’s the daunting part of getting your CFI rating. You basically have all of the books and reference materials you have accumulated during your training for Private, Single engine, Multi-engine, Commercial, and Instrument ratings. This is a stack of books about 2 feet high, and you have to lug it around with you back and forth to the flight school for a month or two while you are training.

You and your instructor practice everything you need to know for your checkride (which, as far as I know is everything there is to know about General Aviation, and they throw in a couple of books about learning theory and how to teach) in the air and on the ground. You’ll go out and practice teaching your instructor how to do stalls and steep turns and whatnot. That dynamic is difficult to get used to.

You’re flying with the guy who taught you most of what you now know, and he has been instructing for six years or whatever. This translates to “You probably aren’t going to teach him much that he doesn’t already know, and if he has any feedback for you, it’s going to be about the stuff you screwed up.”

So by the time you take all of the written tests and get your endorsement to take the checkride with an FAA examiner, you have 4000 pages of reference material for aerodynamics, weather, regulations, systems, and teaching. In the interim 2 months, you have read and highlighted every page and neatly condensed it to a mere 3,761 pages of lesson plans.

The part that blew my mind was that a few days before my ride, I looked at that massive pile of books and realized that with the possible exception of certain parts of the FAR/AIM (big government publication that outlines every rule that applies to every part of flying every plane in every type of operation and airspace in the universe), someone could pick any book out of that pile, turn to any page in that book, and I could confidently teach a good 20-30 minutes on it from memory, and then I could bust out my lesson plans and teach/bore the living shit out of them for as long as they could sit there. I guess that’s when I had to admit to myself that I was as ready as I was going to get.

I’ll freely admit that when I started this process I honestly did not think that I was going to be able to get through it. I don’t know if it is a confidence thing or just the “no fricking way” feeling that came with realizing how much I had in front of me.

When it comes to self-doubt, there is no better feeling than proving yourself wrong.

After about seven hours of teaching and flying and teaching while flying, or “fleaching”, the FAA examiner assigned to me was satisfied that I could adequately give instruction in a multi-engine airplane without hurting or killing myself or anyone else. I was going to hug him, but he assured me that that was not on the checklist.

About three years ago, my dad (retired airline pilot) got his CFI rating and I went up with him the next day and my logbook was the first one he signed as a general aviation instructor. After my CFI checkride was done and I was blowing the ink dry on my temporary certificate, dad and I took off in the DA-42 and did a few maneuvers, making his logbook the first one I signed. Cheesy, but one of those things I’m very happy to have been able to do.

So now I’m going to be a flight instructor for a while and look forward to the next step in this aviation thing. I’ll be getting certified to teach instrument flying and single engine stuff, and eventually I’ll be at an airline. Don’t care which one, don’t care how much (or little) they pay, don’t care if I’m gone three weeks a month, don’t care if I get furloughed and have to go back to instructing, and I don’t care how hard it is to get wherever I’m going. I’ll be flying, bitches.

Check out my YouPube.com flying video (use your speakers, punks)-