Flight Instructor Certificate

Being a good pilot and being a good teacher of pilots are two different skills. The Flight Instructor Certificate course is for licensed pilots who want to pass on what they know, whether as a full-time career at an academy like ours or as a training captain at an airline, freight line or rescue service.

The course runs for 16 weeks at Tasman Field, with a short block at Shackleton Base on Luna. Roughly half the time is spent on teaching itself: how adults learn, how to structure a lesson and a briefing, how to spot a student who is quietly overloaded, and how to give a debrief that changes behaviour rather than just listing faults. You will also study assessment standards, the regulations that govern check rides and the record-keeping that keeps an academy honest.

The other half is flying from the wrong seat. Trainee instructors log 60 flight hours in the right-hand seat of the Sparrow Trainer and the Kestrel light shuttle, learning to let a student make small mistakes while staying ready to intervene on big ones. A further 50 simulator hours focus on fault injection: setting up failures for students and managing the session safely when things go wrong. In the last month you teach real First Solo students under the supervision of a senior instructor.

Each cohort of 10 is guided by three instructor-examiners. Tuition is 72,000 credits, and graduates who join the Lumen faculty for two years have it refunded. You need a Commercial Pilot Licence (Orbital) and at least 1,000 hours as pilot in command. The next intake starts on 5 January 2188.

Our first-time pass rate is 92 per cent. Successful candidates receive the Flight Instructor Rating, which allows them to teach for the Private Spaceflight Licence and, after further experience, to supervise type rating courses.