Why Instructor Quality Matters More Than Most People Realize
Written by Trevor Dobbs
When most students begin flight training, they tend to focus on obvious challenges like scheduling and finances—and for good reason. These are often the two biggest hurdles that can impact how fast and smoothly a student progresses.But there’s another factor that, while not always talked about, can play a major role in your experience and outcome as a student pilot: the quality of instruction.
At Dobbs Flight Service, we’ve seen firsthand how much a student’s training can be affected—for better or worse—by who’s in the right seat beside them.The Underestimated Influence of Instructor QualityA strong instructor doesn't just pass on knowledge—they help a student navigate challenges, maintain momentum, and build confidence. A disengaged or unprepared instructor, on the other hand, can slow down progress, create confusion, mishandle scheduling, or fail to address plateaus in learning.
Over time, that leads to a frustrating, costly, and inefficient training experience.In some schools, the instructor isn’t even responsible for your progress—third-party schedulers may handle your training plan. That disconnect makes it hard for your instructor to guide your learning in a consistent or effective way.We believe that a high-quality instructor creates a more efficient, supportive, and successful training environment.
How Dobbs Flight Service Prioritizes Instructional Quality
We’ve built our instructional model to make sure students are supported by engaged, capable, and continually improving instructors.
1. Intentional Hiring: We don’t hire just any CFI. We look for people who want to teach, not just build hours. That’s why we hire slowly and selectively—our instructors are chosen for their mindset as much as their credentials.
2. Immediate Instructor Development: New hires don’t just jump into the schedule. Every instructor goes through a professional development program and an internal checkride before they work with students. This ensures alignment with our standards from day one.
3. Ongoing Line Checks: Our CFIs participate in monthly, quarterly, and semi-annual line checks. This helps us track performance, address weak points, and reinforce best practices.
4. Mentorship from Lead Instructors: Every instructor is assigned a lead instructor who provides guidance, oversight, and accountability. This mentorship model ensures that instructors continue growing—and that students benefit from a more unified training approach.
5. Weekly Progress Reviews: As a team, we meet every week to review every student’s progress. We forecast training needs, identify potential roadblocks, and develop custom strategies to help students stay on track.
6. Data-Driven Instruction: We constantly collect performance data across all students and instructors. If we see trends we don’t like, we work together to create new SOPs and teaching tactics to improve outcomes.
Our goal is continual refinement—not just for our students, but for our teaching team.
A Better Experience Starts With Better Instruction.
Many students we speak with say the same thing: they feel like their previous instructors weren’t invested in them, didn’t answer their questions, or mishandled their scheduling. They didn’t feel supported—and it showed in their progress.
That’s why we’ve built Dobbs Flight Service to emphasize instructional quality as a core part of your training experience. It’s not the only factor that matters—but it’s one that we believe deserves far more attention than it typically gets.
If you're just starting your flight training journey or looking for a better experience, reach out to us at the contact us page.
We’d love to walk you through how our system works, how we train our instructors, and how we help students succeed. Because great training starts with great instruction—and we’re here to deliver both.
Quality flight instruction matters.
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📍 📍 📍 the two most prominent pain points of all flight training students, as always, finances and scheduling, and those are the two obstacles or hurdles Students initially have to get over that to ensure that the school is gonna be able to continue to progress 'em through at the pace they desire, and they have to make sure that they can finance their entire training.
But the most overlooked frustration or pain point is often quality of instruction. A bad instructor will seriously increase the expense of your training 'cause they will not be able to help you get over those lining plateaus or they'll consistently mishandle your schedule. Or if the student or if the school takes the scheduling out of the instructor's hands, then the instructor himself or herself is actually not responsible for the student's progression.
It's now a third party member who is not actually involved in the flight training process. That's why at Dobbs Flight Service, we try to control for those things first. We make sure that we have the right people on the right seat. We hire slow and selectively. We wanna make sure that we get a brand new instructor that actually cares to be an instructor and understands the importance of being a good instructor.
'cause it ultimately makes you a better pilot. We try to eliminate those who are just looking to build time and don't really care about the individual that they're training. 📍 📍 Next is we want to continue to develop them.
Many flight schools just tire a brand new CFI throw 'em into the line and assert immediately signing them. Students, somebody has to keep the planes running after all. And what that leaves is the students getting random selection as far as experience goes. Maybe they get the brand new guy. Maybe they get the experience guy.
So students often get varied results. We try to control for that through continuing development. Every instructor that gets hired on here is going to immediately have to go through another series of training, a professional development course, and pass a check, right, to make sure that they meet the standards.
Here. We're not just pushing students just to barely pass the a CS or just get through training. We're pushing them to be the best pilots possible. Next is. Each instructor goes through a monthly line check, a quarterly line check, and a semi-annual line check. From there the instructors then are assigned a lead instructor.
We believe in the lead instructor concept.
Where an experienced instructor supervises these younger instructors and ensures that the younger instructors have a resource that they can go to, and then also that the more experienced instructor can hold them accountable for their teaching and their students' progress. And we do that through weekly meetings every week we meet and we discuss each individual student's progress.
We project their next week of training, potentially two to three weeks of training. And we work through any strategies we need to, to help minimize our learner plateaus. And lastly, just as a instructor group as a whole, we really believe in going through a data-driven approach and always improving because as a flight instructor, you're always learning.
So we collect all this data throughout the course of a student's training. We see how all the students are performing. If there's trends we don't like, we take that trend, we implement it into a product improvement feedback loop. And then as a team, we discuss and debate what's the best way to tackle that issue.
We. Create a, we create a new SOP or training tactic. We implement that into the training and we continue to monitor its progress. Usually works very well, and it helps us continually refine our training process and making sure that our students are finishing and as quick as possible manner and within their budget.
So this is a common frustration I hear from many students that have already embarked upon flight training, that they feel like they're just being used for time building, that their instructor's unable to answer their questions, that they feel like their instructor has mishandled their scheduling or their progress throughout their course of their syllabus or training.
So if you are looking for maybe a new flight school, or you are embarking upon starting flight training for the first time and you're worried about what kind quality of instruction you're gonna get from that flight school, . I encourage you to go to ww.do flight service.com and reach out to us today so we can kind of show you the full process.
We will sit with you. We'll show you in detail how we plan on imparting the best possible experience to you and actually show you what the product of an actual flight school is. It's not having the fanciest planes, it's not having the fanciest hangers.
It is how the instructor is able to impart their knowledge to you as efficiently and effectively as possible so you're able to not only meet the standard, but exceed the standard and progress through your training as quickly as possible.
