Short YouTube video by Kenny Keller explaining who is qualified to sign off the five hours of instrument training required for the FAA commercial pilot certificate. Keller clarifies that the five hours must be logged as instruction from an instructor (CFI) or from an instrument-rated 'safety pilot' who can act as a qualified instructor (referred to as a 'double I'), and recounts an example where a candidate had only a non-CFI safety pilot signoffs and had to re-fly time. He cites an examiner’s rationale that the five hours are intended to prepare a pilot for inadvertent IMC, not to provide a full instrument course.
Questions this video answers
Five hours.
A certified flight instructor (CFI) or an instrument-rated safety pilot (a 'double I') acting as instructor.
Chapters
Next topic in our 30 days of 30 videos, talking about our 30 checkrides in the last 30 months. Love the number three. This is for commercial training. The five hours of instrument time required for the commercial. This is one that comes up a lot. And there's some confusion around this. That five hours of instrument training that we talked about yesterday on how those flights should be logged. Today I want to talk about who can sign you off for those. Those five hours of training can be a CFI or can be a double eye. We had one of our people showed up for a check ride recently. He was going for commercial, but all five of his hours that he had in instrument time he did with a safety pilot who was not a cfi. So we immediately said, that's not going to work. This has to be from an instructor. And he's like, well, I was under the impression that it could just be instrument training with a safety pilot. That's not the case. It has to be from an instructor. So we had to hurry up and fly off a bunch of extra time that week to get that five hours in. And his prep for the test on the sign off. Here's what we know, and here's another part of the question that comes up is sometimes people think it has to be a double eye that gives them the that five hours of training for the commercial. That's not true as well. And I got this directly from our examiner way back when this question came up. And when I first posed the question to him years ago, he said, here's the deal, here's what that five hours is for. He said, yes, it can be a CFI or it can be a double I. The reason is this five hours of training for instrument, for commercial is to give the applicant hopefully at least enough experience if they went inadvertent IMC getting out in the commercial world, they would know enough to be able to go to the instruments, call for help and get them out of trouble. It's not to teach, necessarily teach a full instrument course. It's what do I do if I inadvertently go into the clouds? I gotta level my wings, I gotta level the aircraft, I gotta go on instruments, I need to climb, I need to declare an emergency, squawk an emergency and call for help and get vectored to an airport or to get you out of that bad weather. That is the reason that they allow a CFI to do that training, because a certified flight instructor can give that training to someone. You can sit there beside them. You are in essence a safety pilot. But you can also coach them on. Okay, put the foggles on. You just want to inadvertent IMC and your instructor can act as a tower. Okay. And you can go back and forth and instruct the pilot on what to do, what heading to turn, what altitude to fly to get them out of trouble. So that's what that five hours of training for. And I remember way back when I called my examiner and asked him that and he said, if somebody wants to argue, tell him to call me because that's what that five hours is for. And it makes sense. Right. And do we think five hours is enough? Pretty iffy. But they want you to at least have the basics again so that you can hopefully go on the instruments, declare an emergency climb, get up above your obstacles and get help to get out of the clouds. So do us a favor, subscribe to the channel, click that bell, you'll be notified of the other videos we got coming out. We've got another probably 20 videos in this series that we'll be coming out with. And again, what we're doing is basically just covering things that we've seen in the past 30 months with 30 different checkrides. Just things that are popping up that. That can be a problem and some things that are positive as well. But it's just what is currently happening, what are we seeing? And these things that we bring up usually are usually in like twos and threes. It's not just one insulated or isolated incident. It's several people have had a problem in this same area. So we'll just keep bringing them back to you and we'll see you next video. Peace out.
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