Fly for the airlines long enough and you’ll learn that not every pilot can teach. Some pilots should just stick to flying (more on that later). However, if you have the stomach and backbone for it, teaching someone to fly is an incredible experience. You’ll need the stomach to withstand vomit-inducing aircraft control by a student pilot on a windy day and the backbone to tell a highly motivated pilot when they’re not ready to progress to the next step and need more training. Look past that though and you have the privilege to step out of an airplane and tell that same pilot to do this next takeoff and landing “solo”. You’ve never met a happier person than the student pilot after their first solo — except for their instructor, who’d been holding their breath for 3 minutes or more. This is me in front of the flight school in Caldwell, NJ that took a chance on me in 2004.
Not every pilot is a teacher
