In our fourth and final installment of our blog series on the individual ratings within FAA helicopter training, we have reached the point where the student becomes the teacher: the Certified Flight Instructor rating. As I outlined last week, you'll be ready to fly commercial once you complete your Commercial rating, at least from a certification standpoint. But generally you must complete 1,000 hours of flight time to meet the minimum requirements that helicopter and their insurers require for hiring, and becoming a CFI is the fastest way by far to do so. For international students, a CFI rating along with our F-1 visa program, which allows up to 23 months of relevant employment upon training completion, is the ideal combo for earning the flight hours needed to land their dream job back home.
If you review FAA helicopter training offered at other flight schools, you might come away with the impression that the CFI rating has no minimum number of flight hours; this is where it's important to understand whether that flight school meets the higher training standard of a Part 141 flight academy vs the less rigorous standard of a Part 61 school. FAA Part 141 requires 25 hours of flight time and 40 hours of ground, with a minimum threshold of 200 hours of flight time in order to instructor in a Robinson R22. What this means, for all practical purposes, is that you can gain some efficiency from the hours you spent on your Commercial rating, so that your total flight hours ends up being the difference between 200 hours and the total hours you earned through Commercial.
Because the CFI rating is all about teaching you how to teach, there is a significant ground school component: 40 hours is the FAA Part 141 minimum. You'll learn how to identify common student mistakes and how to correct them, and you'll also learn the fundamentals of instruction itself: How to break down instructions so that students can comprehend them, how to motivate students to keep trying and to push past problem areas, and how to evaluate student performance while keeping them on the path to success. And then of course you'll have the opportunity to demonstrate that you've achieved these teaching abilities in the air -- this time from the left seat.
As I've written elsewhere, the value of a CFI rating in FAA helicopter training isn't simply the path it provides to hours-building. It also delivers the unbeatable value of "learning by teaching," also known as The Protege Effect. A helicopter pilot who has logged hundreds of hours as an instructor has effectively repeated the core content of their flight training multiple times over, and has done so with the goal of maximizing someone else's chances of success. That's going to be a much more competent and qualified pilot than someone who has repeated the same rote tasks under the same conditions over and over, and helicopter employers know it.