Under the new FARs set to take effect on December 1, 2024, there will no longer be an expiration date shown on a flight instructor certificate. Nevertheless, an instructor will still have to meet certain experience and activity requirements every 24 calendar months. It is also going to have a “grace” period for CFIs who slip up and don’t meet the 24-month activity requirement—they can take an approved flight instructor refresher course (FIRC).
As things shake out, we suspect that there will be some initial confusion, but that all will be well so long as CFIs keep track of when they’ve got to meet their activity requirement. And, after speaking with an FAA inspector who told us that he’d been called by a CFI two days after his CFI had expired and had to tell the CFI that he was out of luck, it was checkride time again, we think the new rules will prove popular for procrastinators and FAA inspectors who have had to pass along bad news to them for years.
Commercial FIRCs
Our bottom line—we think that commercial FIRCs are going to remain popular and may even increase in popularity as the longtime procrastinators realize that they can fix their screwups less painfully.
We admit here and now that we’re weird—some say that we have weird where other people don’t have places—because we have historically liked FIRCs more than we have disliked them. Yes, they take time, but little in the great scheme of things. We particularly liked when they were weekend ground schools because we learned not only from the instructor(s), our classmates tended to be an interesting bunch, we learned from them and made some good friends.
As the online age advanced, the weekend classes slowly disappeared and electronic FIRCs or EFIRCs became the renewal method of choice among virtually all CFIs we know, save those who can do so on the basis of sending a lot of students for checkrides successfully.
We’ve been renewing via EFIRC for more years than we like to consider. This time around we chose to go with AOPA’s (www.aopa.com) electronic program. It was advertised at $124, but marked down to $85. There’s a lot of competition in the EFIRC world with King charging $125 (www.kingschools.com), Sporty’s (www.sportys.com) offering it for free and American Flyers (www.americanflyers.com) charging a one-time $99 fee, then free for life.
Comments we’ve received from instructors on EFIRCs range from “I just want to get the expletive thing done as fast as possible,” to “Wow, I actually picked up some good information.”
As an instructor who instructs part-time at an FBO where there are full-time instructors, we see how up to date the full-time instructors are in comparison to us. We do our best to keep up with changing regs, technology and airman testing procedures and requirements. We truly give a damn about giving the best instruction to our students even though we’re not totally immersed in the process as a full-timer is. Accordingly, we really rely on the FIRCs we take and we expect them to bring us up to date on changes and how to teach glass cockpits and satellite-based navigation and weather.
Creating a FIRC
In the past we worked with some schools that put on FAA-approved FIRCs and learned that the FAA doesn’t hand out its approval easily. Not only are there topics that must be covered, it must be to a satisfactory depth and the quizzes that must be passed can’t be the hopelessly simple things we saw 20 years ago. They’ve got to require some thought on the part of the applicant.
When we look at an EFIRC, we’re looking at what the “mandatory” segments are as well as whether there are any “electives” and what they are. Most importantly, once we pass everything in the course, does the course allow us to navigate through the process of applying to the FAA through IACRA to get our new certificate?
The AOPA course jumps through all of those hoops. It provides mandatory and elective segments (some very good ones, in our opinion), it doesn’t restrict you from taking extra elective segments if you want to learn about a subject and the course stays up after you finish it if you want to review something.
As is to be expected, the FAA always has topics of concern based on what it’s seeing in the field and they evolve over time.
Mandatory Topics
The 12 mandatory subjects are: Navigation in the 21st Century; Security Related Special Use Airspace; TSA, What CFIs Have to Know; Teaching to Effectively Build a Culture of Safety; Safety Trends; Pilot Deviations; Use of the FAASTeam and WINGS; Regulatory Policy and Publications; Giving an Effective IPC; Loss of Control Accidents; Instructing with the ACS; and CFIs and Remote Pilot Applications.
The elective modules are Advanced Endorsements; Insurance and Proficiency-Focused Instruction; Decision-Making; Refreshing CFIs on Sport Pilot and LSAs; Seaplane Safety; Survival; Teaching CFIT Avoidance; Helicopter Safety; VFR into IMC Avoidance; UAS.
The course can be accessed on just about any computer, tablet or smartphone. It has a simple, straight-forward presentation of your progress among and within modules. We liked that the module segments were generally bite-sized as there were times we knew we had 10 or 15 free minutes and that would get us through a module or two. There are some videos that are longer, but not many.
The modules average about an hour to finish. At the end of each is an eight-question quiz that requires that you paid attention during the module. Passing rate is 70 percent. You can have a second try at passing. If you have a bad day and fail twice, it’s necessary to call AOPA and have the quiz reset.
We went through the course during a time when we were recovering from minor surgery and we found the ability to work for a while, step away and come back right to where we’d left off to be valuable.
We found the lessons to be paced about right and focused at the appropriate level—experienced pilots who don’t want a bunch of filler nonsense to meet a requirement for the length of a session. We thought that the modules were content rich overall.
There were some impressive aviation experts who made presentations, notably Rod Machado and Catherine Cavagnaro. There were also some powerful videos by pilots who had had utterly awful experiences, including fatal accidents. The one of breaking down a wheels-down seaplane landing in which the aircraft flipped and the pilot’s son perished was moving and gets one thinking about the human factors that can lead to mistakes that have terrible consequences.
The only complaint we had was that some of the videos in mandatory modules were repeated in electives—something that wasn’t needed.
The Loss of Control module was well done, especially with interior and exterior views of a Cessna 152 Aerobat and aerobatic Beech Bonanza and an informed discussion of aerodynamics by Cavagnaro. It was then soured at the end by a passing introduction to two LOC avoidance techniques that didn’t fit the quality of the rest of the module, including one that didn’t really make sense.
Conclusion
We think highly of AOPA’s EFIRC, felt that we learned a great deal, had few complaints and recommend it.
