From Student to Instructor: CFI #25! Gabriel’s Final Approach to Excellence

Number 25, Gabriel Armas, certified flight instructor. Initial. I'm hand his certificate back. I just wanted to take a look at it. He's number 25 of final approach courses we've done since we got the R44 a couple years ago. And we just want to shoot this real quick in the moment because it's still fresh in his mind and our minds. And Gabriel had, you know, one of the top checkrides I've done in 25 years of teaching. And this 25 is his. One of his favorite numbers. And I want to just kind of share that. We had a checkride today with Gabriel that started off the way a checkride should start off because he is meticulous in nature. We did a short video the other day showing his highlighting his logbook and how clean and neat the whole logbook is. And I. And I commented right away, and I said, I got to show this in a video. So not only does he have a meticulous logbook, the endorsements were meticulous. He actually prepared them before he got here. So all I had to do was sign him, give him the training, and then sign them as we went. And because they were all within two pages and he had it so nice and neat, examiner comes in the door, he goes right to the documents, goes right to the endorsements, has a couple questions, and then, boom, the checkride has started. And you don't know how many times checkrides start in the wrong foot because somebody doesn't have the right endorsement, they didn't sign it. They printed their name instead of signing their name. Whatever the case, long list of reasons why checkrides start off on a good note. And then further, I'm going to give him a chance to talk in a minute. But preparation is key, people, for any checkride, but especially the cfi. And the CFI we know has to be at very high level of knowledge. And Gabriel presented that to me in zooms before he came up here. We did several zooms, and that's how I was able to evaluate how many days I thought that we would need him. And I said, you know what? I really. Right from the beginning, I was impressed with his presentation skills, his knowledge. The first day, he grabbed the whiteboard, started showing me something so I knew he could teach. But I said, come a day or two early, just in case, because you never know about weather, whatever. Well, we were scheduled for tomorrow, and we're done today, Thursday, by noon, because the weather looks bad tomorrow. Examiner calls and says, oh, my gosh, what about the weather. And I go, well, you know what, we're ready if you want to go tomorrow, which is today. And he's like, well, let me see if I can work that. So we went a day early. Even we went a day earlier to avoid bad weather tomorrow. And I just can't say enough about how refreshing it is to have a student. He's not a student. He's a commercial pilot now, certified flight instructor. But the level of preparation that he has done for this checkride is not only obvious to me, it was obvious to the examiner. And we normally, the best we can hope from the examiner is good job today and then a quick critique and we got that. But we got more than that. And we don't get that very often. He commented on just he's passionate. He was. I could tell about your passion about training. I can tell this is important to you. And we got some extra. Just a few little tidbits. And when you get that little extra, you know, that was a good checkride. So congratulations, kudos to you. I think tomorrow he's the. Now that we got an extra day, instead of going home early, he's going to hang around tomorrow.

We're going to have fun.

We're going to have fun tonight. We're going to go out and do the local hangouts, maybe a little karaoke. He's promised us some karaoke tunes.

We'll see about that.

That's what he keeps saying anyway, and. But I just. I had to relive that part of it. So if you take anything away from this preparation people, it's preparation, study, acs, going through everything the way you need to go through it, go through the far aim and just. And you can do this and you can do it well just like you did. Anybody can do what you did today.

We need to take advantage of the resources that we have. And it's supremely important that for the same way that we set up an approach and we take our time to make sure that it's the best approach we can have. The same way that we do this final approach course, the setup is on us, the students, and obviously with the guidance here at the school, which has been wonderful, it's very easy to fit in all of those things that we need to do to be able to be successful. Of course, you know, it's important that we get prepared and that we know exactly what we need to. To do to get a rating. It's difficult depending on the rating that you're going to get. If you're just A private student starting your career, you need a little bit more guidance. But once you're in the advanced stages of your career, it should become easier to be able to do this and to be able to do it without any sort of pressure on its own time and being able to provide the information necessary to keep moving forward.

Absolutely. Tomorrow we're going to do kind of a. Kind of a podcast thing or come up with some topics and we're going to sit down and have a longer video at length and just talk about your checkride and things we experienced and just general stuff about helicopter training. So we're going to do that tomorrow. We just want to get this video out today on this. And so if you're interested in flight training in Florida, Southern, would you call it? Southern Florida?

Central Florida.

Central Florida.

There we go.

Tell them where they can find you.

Absolutely. So we're at ROTOR School and we're in Lake Wales, Florida, right in the center of the state. We operate Robinson's R22s and R44s. Our website is rotor.school without the dot com. And our social media is Rotor School US.

So you're gonna see more Gabriel because I've already recruited him to help us with some videos, whether we travel down to Florida or I have him come back here, whatever, or do some stuff remotely. He just is such a wonderful presenter and I want to use him to help update some videos. And especially being having the fresh cfi. Right. I've got the experience, but we've, we have the, the freshness of what you've just been through too, which is a big benefit. Right. Because there's a lot of things as a seasoned CFI that maybe we've forgotten and we didn't. It's not as fresh in our minds like it is when you've just been through the training. So you'll see more of Gabriel and.

One of the principles of learning recency. So we need to keep it going.

And for our little plug, we are helicopter land ground school. And we've. What we do is what we call the final approach course. And here's an example of where Gabriel might have a student that maybe he's trained, but they're having trouble scheduling an examiner or something and somebody that wants to get a checkride done, maybe at some point he'll send us a checkride. We'd like to do the finish work. We really don't do initial training. We do finish work and that's people that come from around the country. Again, he's number 25 we've done the last couple years. We've helped people from the outskirts of the US they come from Oregon and Maine and Florida and Texas and New Mexico and. But they come to us when they can't get an examiner lined up or the examiner's book six months or their instructor just left or their helicopter's in overhaul or whatever reason. A long list of reasons why sometimes a flight school can't get somebody done in a timely manner. And we have an examiner I've been working together with since 2001, and he does his best to accommodate us and get people in. So we bring you in for a few days and finish you up and get your checkride done. So congratulations again. Rotor school in Florida and Hogs at Indiana. Helicopter Line ground school in Indiana. And we'll see you in the next video. Like I said, we're going to do a podcast tomorrow and we'll go more in depth in training and all kinds of good stuff. So do us a favor and give us a like and actually we'd like to see some. Some good feedback. Absolutely nothing wrong with haters, but I've been kind of wondering where our fans are. Like, we get a lot of hate lately, but it's like, not hate, but just a lot of like, where is our? Where's our? Where's our? Oh, geez. Anyway, leave a comment down below. Good or bad? Peace out.

When you feel the pressure to fly, but know the right decision is to stay on the ground, hit the hogs no go and live to fly another day. Helicopter.com Number 25.

Number 25. Number 25.