Tim Tucker’s Tip: Mastering the FAR/AIM for Student Success

So we're wrapping up our 30 days of videos on stuff we've seen. And I want to point something out to you that I learned from Tim Tucker when I did my CFI checkride 25 years ago, and this is still valid today. And what Tim taught us, me and another guy went out to California together to do our instructor ratings. And after the checkrides were done, a full day oral, finished the oral the second day and then did our flights. So most of you know who Tim Tucker is and probably understand the status of Tim and the type of examiner he was. So when we were done, he said, I want to show you guys something. He said, instructors are not doing a good enough job at showing people kind of how to use the far aim, how to quickly look things up. And he said, I want to show you guys something. Almost any question that we ask as examiners is the private level is going to come from one of just a few sections in the far aim. So I'm going to have Lindsey hand the camera over here to me and I'll see how, if I can make this point. He said, you grab your student's far aim, take their highlighter and you go highlight these. Part 43, maintenance, preventive maintenance, rebuilding and alteration. Part 61, certification, pilots, flight instructors and ground instructors. Part 67, medical standards and certification. Part 91, general operating and flight rules. And then 49 CFR, NTSB, 830, accident reporting, NTSA flight training, security program. So his point was, you know, when in the heat of the moment at a checkride, somebody needs a quick way to think of something when it's a question that's regulation oriented hit. He said, almost anything that we're going to ask is going to come from one of those sections. Not saying you'll never use the other sections of the manual, but most likely it's going to come from one of those. And the last 30 check rates, I can tell you, I always show this to people every single time. And maybe through after a couple of days I'll say, okay, what parts? Where do you look up maintenance, if you want to do maintenance. Oh yeah, that's. I'm like, come on, pop that thing off. Part 43, part 61 is how we get our license. Anything regarding getting your license is going to be under part 61. If we go out and break a reg in part 91, that's how we end up losing our license. Part 67, of course, examiners are going to ask you about medical standards and certification and then the NTSB830 accidents and incidents. Examiners are always going to ask about, what's an incident? What's an accident? When do you have to report the different types of things that can happen? And I found this to be true in the past 25 years of teaching. And it's just come real clear in the last 30 checkrides that. And most guys do pretty good with it, but a lot of times they'll have to go. I'll think back. Remember the page I showed you? Oh, yeah, yeah. So just a simple tip for any of you studying, getting ready, and for you instructors, a good point to help your students be able to reference things quickly. And he also told us, you know, a lot of people overlook going to the rear of the book and just looking up. Direct what you want to look. For example, altitude. The examiner says, what's the minimum altitude for helicopters? You can go back here, go to altitude, scroll down the minimum for helicopters, boom, go right to the page. Because a lot of people will get asked a question during a checkride, and then they're confused and they're flipping the book, and the examiner's kind of huffing and puffing or tapping their thing on the table while you're going page to page because you're nervous and you're trying to figure out where it's at. So that's the quickest way right there from the far contents, far aim contents, or the far contents, and then don't remember. Remember, you can go to the back to look things up quickly as well. And we wanted to mention we just had a member send a message in. Just wanted to let you know again how incredibly useful the AI assistant is. I've asked a ton of questions, and your answers have always been incredibly helpful. I think the course would not nearly, would not be nearly as effective without it. What we've done is we've taken our AI clone and put it inside hogs. So every single video, as you're going through the courses, if you watch a video and you have a question about something, the AI is right there. So 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can ask questions. And 14 years of my content is piped into that. So you're getting direct from our, you know, 14 years of content, paid content, free content, YouTube, blogs, podcasts, the whole works is in there. So we just wanted to point that out, that we're getting this. More and more people are going, man, that AI thing is freaking amazing. 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