Kenny Keller breaks down how flight instructors are skipping required endorsements, leaving students unprepared for checkrides. He walks through logbook examples where cross-country flights don't meet the 2.0-hour minimum and endorsements are missing entirely. CFIs should carry FARs 61 and 65 during checkrides to catch these gaps.
Kenny Keller
FAR 61 and FAR 65
Required 2.0 (student had 1.8)
The lack of quality instruction is destroying our industry because of the lack of proper flight training. Here's a piece of advice that if you ever watch any of these videos is one that you really need to pay attention to because here's what's going on. Instructors are not always using proper endorsements and this is happening more than what you would think. So don't just blame this on your instructor. You as a student, you taking lessons, you should be working through the far AIM with your instructor. It's clearly laid out in here what you need to do. For example, we'll say the private pilot. And I'm continually having people come here from other parts of the country and have logbooks that are a complete mess. Endorsements that weren't given at all, which makes the flying they were doing illegal or endorsements not properly given. So I am blaming instructors who aren't doing their job on this one. But I'm telling you as students and people working on advanced ratings, you have to sit down, open up the far AIM and you got to go through the requirements step by step and make sure they're all met. I'm going to give you an example of one I've seen twice in a row now where a person was working on. I think both times they're working on commercial and they needed a cross country that needed to be 2.0. And I'm going through their logbook and I'm checking all the requirements because we're getting ready to send them to a checkride with our final approach course. And I find their flights 1.8. And I'm like this isn't going to work. And they're like well my instructor said it was all right. I said, well your instructor didn't open the FAR aim and read 2.0 right? And this is happening a lot. We had a student here this year who working on a commercial add on. He had a whole bunch of solo time. He hadn't had an endorsement in over a year. He had one initial endorsement for solo over a year ago, had since had done cross countries and all kinds of different training and he didn't have any of the frickin endorsements. He ended up going home because I sat and looked through it and I'm like I can't even. There's nothing I can do here. I can't even clean this up. And you've technically been flying illegally. So either you got to get your instructor up here, go back there, do something and you got to fix these endorsements because you were flying illegally. It's just, it's really frustrating to me that instructors half the time do such a sloppy ass job. You know, there's a lot of good instructors out there and they're great flight schools doing what they're supposed to be doing, and that's great. But instructors, when you don't get the proper endorsements, do you realize the amount of time and money that this customer is out when they can't take a checkride and realize half their training doesn't count or they got to go try to fix endorsements? It's ridiculous. There is no reason to not sit down, go through the far aim step by step. I always say it's like we're in kindergarten, right? We open it up, I go, okay, what are you going for? You're going for private pilot. Okay, so. So we go to private pilot and we go, okay, this many hours. You got that? Yep. You have this. Show me. Where'd you go on your solo cross country? Okay, let's get out the iPad and let's check the. Check the length and make sure that all this is correct. There's so much that goes into preparing for these checkrides. It's a lot. I get it. But what we need to do is lay it out in black and white in the far aim. There is no reason for you as an instructor to not be properly going through this and making sure they, your students have the endorsements they need. And I highly advise you, students or add on ratings go through them as well. Even though your instructor checked it, you check it. I'd go through it with your instructor together, but you can't. I can't stress enough. I recently talked to. I'm not going to mention his name because I didn't ask him if I could use his comment. But somebody way up there in the flight training world, seeing all kinds of flight training going all over the world, says the lack of quality instruction is destroying our industry because of the lack of proper flight training. Again, kudos to those people that do it right, because we know you're out there. Plenty of great instructors, plenty of great flight schools, but there's a lot of shady characters and people that just plain don't care. All they're doing is putting time in their log book. They give a rat's ass about you ever getting your rating. And then one other thing. 61, 65. Very easy. We've got several copies of this. Every CFI I send has a copy of these and goes to the checkride because my examiner told me over 20 years ago. Every CFI that you bring have 6165 printed out and on the table because we're going to be talking about endorsements and we're going to be looking at them up. Anybody can go online and get this for free, download it to your iPad. Make a book like this. It's not rocket science. What radio are you working for? What are you going, what are you doing? Go in, find the right endorsement and fill it out properly. There's my ramp for today. It's just really annoying that you know customers spend a lot of money on aircraft and ground time and those instructors that are doing people a real disservice by not filling out proper endorsement. Do it, read it, go through it step by step. Private Pilot 101 Free PDF down below Peace out.
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