What do CFI-Gs do? Everybody skip that part? Somebody skip it? Should it skipped at all and if so, why? Since half post anonymously this is a great opportunity for learning and candor.

Hello.

What do we do as a club? Skyline Soaring Club has a training syllabus, that all of our instructors are required to follow. It has a list of all the 61.87 requirements that must be documented. If it's in 61.87, it's in our syllabus.

http://skylinesoaring.org/TRAINING/Syllabus/

We have it computerized. Every time the flight instructor and student fly together, the flight log database detects that there was an instructional flight. The instructor is emailed a request to fill out a flight lesson record. The instructor selects which lesson plan entries were done, scored on a 1-4 rating. The instructor writes an essay describing what was done. At 11 pm, the instruction report gets mailed to the student and all of the other instructors.

Each of the items in the syllabus have a lesson plan, describing what is expected of the student, what is expected of the instructor, external references.

All of the items in 61.87 are tracked in the form of a progress bar. When the progress bar gets all the way to the right, the student has met all of the 61.87 requirements, and will be ready to solo once an instructor thinks the student can "put it all together" . The whole student record is stored in a database, and can be viewed by the student, or any instructor. If student Jeff has been flying with Bob, instructor Mike can get caught up on all of Jeff's progress by looking at the instruction report. We have 15 years of instruction reports and flight logs to see how long it takes for us to get a student through the program.

Skyline Soaring Club's syllabus is used by several other clubs around the country. The contents of the lesson plans are free for your club to adapt to its needs.

The syllabus was envisioned as a way for us to make sure that all the checkboxes got ticked off before a student was able to go flying solo. We trade students between instructors as a normal part of business. If you are the instructor taking over from another guy, do you make your student do everything in 61.87 all over again? It could take weeks or months to get everything accomplished. What do you do to make sure that everything in 61.87 was covered? Can you really decipher that logbook entry?

Consider this scenario: I had a student break up a glider in an accident. Once the FAA comes to investigate, there's no documentation that I ever did training with the student in an area that was a contributing factor to the crash. Sure, I did that lesson with the student several times -- BUT IT WAS NEVER WRITTEN DOWN. I don't ever want to be put into that position.

If yours is a club that has 2 instructors, and a student spends 100% of his time with only one instructor, the online syllabus is still useful. It's useful because that student is eventually going to fly with another instructor, and having a detailed training record online is SO much better than awful chicken scratch in a logbook that has not nearly enough space to document everything.

To answer your question, "We don't skip that part. It's a part of the training syllabus. Every club should have a training syllabus. If yours is a club that thinks that a syllabus is for sissies, reconsider your choice of clubs. Try to find one that doesn't have these macho, invulnerability or anti-authority hazardous attitudes. "