Good details. Some comments @foreseth11 ...
First, are you one of the lucky few who’ve flown with Greg / P1D? I’m just going on your Phenom story here. Ha, so I’m curious. Which one are you, if so?
First off, remember this is a teaching test, not like any other checkride you’ve done. Don’t freak yourself out too much about the rote memorization of the FOI material. There may be some DPEs out there who might want that memorized, but think about it from their shoes.
They want to see you actually studied the material and have ideas on how to APPLY it to teaching. If you stumble on two out of seven of some list of things in the FOI, it’s VERY unlikely to be a bust. It’s an open book checkride, and you’re NOT teaching your simulated student the FOI.
Your DPE will go back and forth between traditional knowledge questions as an evaluator and pretending to be a student, if they’re any good. They’ll tell you when they’re each. But the “knowledge” DPE personality isn’t that likely to hammer you on that list of stuff. They will ask about it, maybe, if that’s one of their things they like to ask about the FOI. They’re not looking for FOI perfection. They’re looking to see that you studied the rather dense material and thought about how it applies to teaching a student.
The FOI is a terminology basis for discussing how to teach. It’s not the end all be all of teaching, and I can’t think of any local DPE who thinks it is. So study it. But relax a bit. You can look up a couple of items if you show you’re understanding where their question is going. Take a brain box along and be organized with reference materials and you’ll be fine on knowledge questions.
Remember what they’re evaluating is if you know this material exists, have thought about how you’d apply it, and can hold a serious discussion about teaching it. FARs, AIM, FOI, PHAK, all of the FAA reference material is fair game, but nobody walks into a CFI ride with every FAA document memorized. Hell, then you add ACs, and even Chief Counsel letters, which aren’t organized or published in any sane method, and the material base you have to be aware of as an instructor, is impossibly broad. You MUST show a willingness to reference the source material when teaching. There’s literally no way you can teach all of it from memory.
Okay, let’s talk about your impression of the oral for a sec. it’s actually NOT harder than any other oral you’ve taken. In fact, it’s the SAME orals. But now you’re expected to be able to TEACH the material.
Example: On a Commercial ride, you’re going to be asked detailed systems questions about the aircraft you’re flying today. On a CFI ride, you’re going to be presented with someone who’s “never seen this aircraft before... teach me about the propellor on this airplane”... and they sit and wait.
Your job on this checkride is to figure out how to impart everything you know about the airplane’s propellor to a student. Is it constant speed? What does that mean? Can you draw a diagram and explain why we want that? How is it controlled? How does a propellor work, anyway? How does that control system work? What are the possible failure modes? Why? What are the possible outcomes of a failure?
See? This is not a “what do you know?” checkride. This is a “how do you teach the person who walked in and has never seen the oil cap of their car, how an oil pressure driven propellor system works on an airplane...” checkride.
Watch examples. There’s a lot of them. Lots of people rag on the Kings for example, but... the ENTIRE Commercial maneuvers DVD is LESS than two hours. And they even have time to show in flight examples AND describe EVERYTHING a pilot needs to know about them in that amount of time. They’re assuming a Private rated level of understanding to start with, but they have their information delivery down to a science. ONLY what’s needed.
In this regard, study the ACS. Study it in a different way than you ever have before. Think about how you would present each item and ONLY each item listed. Would that item take an hour? Two? What building blocks would you break it up into to make two or three lessons about it? Did YOU have two or three lessons about that topic? How did YOUR instructor do it?
This is how you need to think about prepping for the CFI ride. It’s not the same prep as for other rides. In the other rides someone prepped you for a session of being grilled on your knowledge and airmanship. In this ride, YOU are that person. You’re prepping the DPE to TAKE these rides.
You quite likely WILL spend a full hour teaching about ONE topic.
Pick up the books looking at them in a new light. “How would I teach this? How would I evaluate a student that I taught?” Grab Kershner books, Machado books, King videos, whatever you can get your hands on, and realize those folks have their methodology down hard. They’ve been doing it for three or more decades.
Mimic them outright, if you’re unsure of how to present a topic. No kidding. They’ve been thinking about how to present that topic for decades longer than you’ve been thinking about it. Their format, visual aids, and flow have been worked out over a LONG period of time.
Study how they TEACH it. Not the material itself. You’re beyond that. If you turn on a Private Pilot video from a pro training place, or on YouTube, watch it for HOW it teaches, not what it teaches.
Think about how you’ll teach and you’ll nail it. Get caught up in tiny details of the FOI, that’s not teaching.
By the way, one of the reasons the CFI checkride is grueling is teaching is a very active thing, mentality and physically. Get up. Grab that airplane model. Show the student how the airplane will move in the air. Draw diagrams on the whiteboard. Show a short video clip of someone who explains it better than you do. Practice this before the ride. With or without a person present.
Four hours of that or more, you’ll be TIRED. You’ll need a break before the flight portion. And then you’ll launch and teach some more. Depart the area safely, teach all the way to the practice area. Traffic scan, radio work, procedures for this aircraft, checklist use, then you’ll demo maneuvers and the DPE may simulate “trying one” and you’ll coach and evaluate, or even stop the maneuver and correct and demonstrate again. Etc.
The fastest way to a CFI ride bust is not to TEACH. You can have an entire brain box of material at your disposal and use it. It’s a test to see if you know how to use the material and convey it in a solid way to someone. NOT a test of the material.
Circling back to the FOI list you mentioned... how would you teach it? How would you evaluate a CFI candidate knew it? Practice on yourself. What worked?
So there’s a typical long Nate post back at’cha. Hope it helps.
